


You Were Right From The Beginning

by LenoreFrost



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Because Where Were Those in S7, Dragonriders, Eventual Smut, F/M, I'm Going to Pretend S8 Doesn't Exist, Jon Snow is a Dragonrider, Jon Snow is a Targaryen, POV Daenerys, Slow Burn, So maybe I should remove the "Slow Burn" tag, Strategy & Tactics, The smut that was promised
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-20 10:08:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 57,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14892623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LenoreFrost/pseuds/LenoreFrost
Summary: What if Daenerys Targaryen had believed Jon Snow about the Whitewalkers from the beginning, when he first came to Dragonstone and insisted upon their existence?





	1. A Meeting at Dragonstone

AU – What if Dany had believed Jon when he first told her about the Whitewalkers?

 

 

            The first thing she thought as the King in the North and his Hand stepped into her throne room was that he was much shorter than she expected.  The second was that her dragons and armies had made the intended impression.  This King of all that is grim, cold, and unyielding was awed and a little terrified.  The third thing, which she was pondering as Missandei listed her titles, was that Jon Snow was far more handsome than she’d expected, and young too, likely little older than her.  Despite that, he wore battle scars on his face and tired, dark eyes that suggested an old soul beneath the pretty face and the black curls.

            “You stand in the presence of Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, Rightful Heir to the Iron Throne, Rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains,” Missandei intoned, her voice more impressive and confident every time she announced her.

            A beat of silence followed, then the King in the North looked to his Hand and the balding man scrambled to say, “This is Jon Snow.”  It was all she could do not to raise an eyebrow.  “He’s King in the North.”

            She had been told that this King’s crowning was fairly recent and that his Hand was less than well-known or well-educated in the intricacies of court, but this was still a surprise.  Hopefully, she could take this as a sign that this would be a brief meeting ending in the North’s allegiance and maybe more swords at her back as allies against the family who had killed Ned Stark.  “Thank you for travelling so far, my lord.  I hope the seas weren’t too rough.”

            Snow smiled the tiniest bit, shuffling on his feet.  He was clearly not well-educated in the intricacies of court either.  “The winds were kind, Your Grace.”

            Before she could respond, his Hand cut in, “Forgive me, Your Grace, I have a Flea Bottom accent, I know, but Jon Snow is King in the North, he’s not a lord, Your Grace.”

            So, this wouldn’t be a brief meeting after all.  She frowned.  “Forgive me, Ser…”

            “Your Grace, this is Ser Davos Seaworth,” Tyrion provided.

            She allowed her brow to crease and assumed the air of a foolish girl, the mask that she had used to turn a negotiation or to undermine an opponent so many times before.  “Forgive me, Ser Davos.  I never did receive a formal education, but I could have sworn that the last King in the North was Torrhen Stark, who bent the knee to my ancestor, Aegon Targaryen.  In exchange for his life, and the lives of his Northmen, Torrhen Stark swore fealty to House Targaryen in perpetuity.  Or do I have my facts wrong?”

            Ser Davos swallowed.  “I wasn’t there, Your Grace.”

            “No, of course not,” she said with that little girl smirk.  “But still, an oath is an oath, and perpetuity means…what does perpetuity mean, Lord Tyrion?”

            “Forever,” Tyrion said.

            She looked to Snow and Ser Davos, allowing a bit of smugness to slip through.  Maybe this little show would remind this _king_ of whom he was dealing with.  “Forever.”  Jon Snow looked down and sighed deeply, as if he were about to do something unavoidable and unsavory, hopefully bending the knee.  “So, I assume, my lord, you are here to bend the knee?”

            It was as he spoke that he slowly looked up to meet her gaze again, a hint of defiance in his dark eyes.  “I am not.”

            _What in Seven Hells…?_  “Oh.”  She blinked, her brain spinning trying to process why in Hells he’d come all this way just to disrespect her.  “Well, that is unfortunate.  You’ve come all this way to break faith with House Targaryen?”

            “Break faith?” Snow asked, an incredulous smile spreading across his face.  There wasn’t an ounce of humor in it and that told her exactly where this conversation was going.  “Your father burnt my grandfather alive.  He burnt my uncle alive.  He would’ve burned the Seven Kingdoms…”

            “My father…” she said, cutting him off before he could get too much momentum, “…was an evil man.”  There.  Snow’s face froze in place as he stumbled over the words he had not expected her to say.  Little did he know how little sympathy she gave to ‘evil men’, and little did he know how carefully she and Tyrion had planned for this meeting.  “On behalf of House Targaryen, I ask for forgiveness for the crimes he committed against your family and ask you not to judge a daughter by the sins of her father.  Our two Houses were allies for centuries, and those were the best centuries the Seven Kingdoms have ever known.  Centuries of peace and prosperity with a Targaryen sitting on the Iron Throne and a Stark serving as Warden of the North.  I am the last Targaryen, Jon Snow.  Honor the pledge your ancestor gave mine and bend the knee and I will name you Warden of the North.  Together, we will save this country from those who would destroy it.”

            Silence.  It was a good speech; she was proud of her charisma and quick thinking and had employed both traits here well.  Now she could only hope that this awkward, inexperienced, northern lord would submit with little further struggle.  Snow shuffled awkwardly and looked around the room as if searching for either a clever response or an exit.  Then, he met her gaze levelly, his eyes dark and more intelligent than she’d initially realized.  “You’re right,” he said, the corners of his mouth curling.  “You’re not guilty of your father’s crimes.  And I’m not beholden to my ancestor’s vows.”

            _This little shit…._ She maintained a straight face despite her frustration at this northern fool’s insolence.  “Then why are you here?”

            There were forty yards between them and half a dozen stairs, yet he was looking at her like an equal, without an ounce of humility or shame.  Whatever diffidence he’d had when he entered the throne room was gone now.  “Because I need your help, and you need mine.”

            _Is he serious?  Where is this going?_   She looked to Tyrion, who beneath his court mask seemed as lost as her.  “Did you see three dragons flying overhead as you arrived?” she asked, somewhat dryly.

            Snow looked down at his boots.  “I did.”

            “And did you see the Dothraki, all of whom have sworn to kill for me?”

            He returned her dryness.  “They’re hard to miss.”

            “And still, I need your help?”  The indignity buzzed under her skin with such force that no amount of will could keep it from her voice.  Who did this northern bastard think he was?  A king, evidently.

            “Not to defeat Cersei,” Ser Davos cut in.  “You could storm King’s Landing tomorrow and the city would fall.  Hell, we almost took it and we didn’t even have dragons.”

            “Almost,” Tyrion said tightly, earning a sharp look from Ser Davos.  The Battle of the Blackwater was a sore spot for her Hand.

            “But you haven’t stormed King’s Landing,” Snow cut in before they could get off track.  “Why not?  The only way I can see is that you don’t want to kill thousands of innocent people.  It’s the fastest way to win the war, but you won’t do it, which means, at the very least, you’re better than Cersei.”

            She raised an eyebrow.  “Still, that doesn’t explain why I need your help.”

            He was still staring her down with those dark eyes, refusing to bend even a bit.  “Because right now, you and I and Cersei and everyone else, we’re all children playing at a game screaming that the rules aren’t fair.”

            _Impudent bastard…._   She looked to Tyrion with a glare, her composure slipping.  “You told me you liked this man.”

            “I do.”

            “Since he has arrived, he has refused to call me queen, he has refused to bow, and now he’s calling me a child.”

            Snow managed to look abashed and Tyrion offered, “I believe he’s calling all of us children.  Figure of speech…”

            Jon Snow looked down to his hands, then snapped, “Your Grace, everyone you know will die before winter’s over if we don’t defeat the enemy to the north.”

            “As far as I can see, you are the enemy to the north,” she snapped back.

            “I am not your enemy.”  He hesitated and seemed to struggle with words he didn’t want to have to say, then looked her in the eye again.  “The dead are the enemy.”

            “The dead.”  _What in Seven Hells…?_   This was not one of the many dozens of ways she and Tyrion had imagined this meeting going.  She looked to her Hand.  “Is that another ‘figure of speech’?”

            “The army of the dead are on the march,” Snow said.

            “The army of the dead,” Tyrion said incredulously.

            Snow shuffled, then asked Tyrion, “You don’t know me well, my lord, but do you think me a liar or a madman?”

            “No,” Tyrion answered, now the one doing the stumbling.  “I don’t think you’re either of those things.”

            “The army of the dead is real.  The Whitewalkers are real, the Night King is real.  I’ve seen them.  If they get past the Wall and we’re squabbling amongst ourselves…” he stepped forward in the fervor of his speech and stopped when her bloodriders took a step that mirrored his.  “We’re finished.”

            The room went still and quiet as she and Jon Snow stared each other down, measuring each other and preparing for their next move like cyvasse players.  She knew one or two stories of the Whitewalkers, but she was well out of her depths here.  Viserys’s interests and her own were primarily focused on their family’s history and that of Valyria, not the North.  She knew that the Whitewalkers were evil beings that could raise the dead and that the First Men had fought them.  Supposedly, the purpose of the Wall originally had been to keep out the Walkers.  But those stories were thousands of years old, if they were true at all.

            And yet, dragons had been instinct and she had laid three dragon eggs on Drogo’s funeral pyre and hatched them.  She had nursed dragons at her breast and ridden one of them, she had raised them to communicate with her and had given them the strength to grow a large as ships.  She’d been told before that she made impossible things happen.  Unburnt.  Breaker of Chains.  Mother of Dragons.  Could she rightly dismiss Jon Snow’s impossibility out of hand when she had proven so many possible?  “What exactly is it that you’ve seen, my lord?” she asked nonchalantly, clutching the arms of her throne as they moved into uncharted territory.

            The dynamic in the room immediately shifted.  Both Hands seemed mildly startled and Snow tripped right over his tongue before answering hesitantly, “The first wight I saw was a Night’s Watchman who had died beyond the Wall.  We brought him back to Castle Black and in the night, he woke with bright blue eyes and tried to kill the Lord Commander.  I fought him, I stabbed him, but it was only when I set him afire that I was able to kill him.  We set out beyond the wall, hoping to get answers, about the dead man and about rumors that the Wildlings were amassing an army.  We learned that the Wildlings’ purpose that united them was a desperation to get south of the wall before the Whitewalkers destroyed them.”

            “And how exactly did the Night’s Watch learn this?”

            Snow shuffled again.  “Under orders, I infiltrated the Wildling forces.  I got to know them, I met Mance Rayder, the King Beyond the Wall.  I traveled with them for months.  The Wildlings are hard people, but they fled the Army of the Dead.”

            _And where were those Wildlings now?_   “Surely we would have heard if the Wall had fallen.  What became of the Wildlings?”

            Snow was staring down at his boots again and answered tightly, “The Night’s Watch repelled them with help from Stannis Baratheon’s forces.  That’s how Ser Davos and I met.  The Wildlings had to retreat to Hardhome.  When I was elected Lord Commander, I led a party north using Stannis’s ships in hopes of ferrying the Wildlings south of the Wall before the dead claimed them and added them to their ranks.  We were too late.  We only got two thousand of tens of thousands aboard the ships before the Army of the Dead arrived.”  Snow paused, seemingly lost in thought.  Was this where he’d gotten those scars over his eyes?  Hardhome?  “We tried to fight them off, but there were so many and we weren’t prepared.  We barely escaped with our lives and as we sailed away, I watched the Night King raise his arms and all those Wildling corpses rise at his bidding.”

            She frowned.  “I am surprised that someone so passionate about this issue would leave the Night’s Watch, especially someone with such an important post.”

            Snow met her eyes, his expression tightly guarded now.  “I was released from my vows.  The Night’s Watch takes no part in the wars of the Seven Kingdoms.  The Boltons were destroying the North and threatening the security of the Wall and the South.  I rode south to reclaim my family’s home.”

            That was certainly not the full story, but now was not the time or the place.  “So be it.  If this Army of the Dead exists, how large do you believe it to be?”

            “Mance Rayder’s Wildling Army was a hundred thousand strong when they marched on the Wall.  I expect the Army of the Dead was fifty thousand strong at that time and added at least fifty thousand more at Hardhome.”

            “And the Northern forces?”

            “The Night’s Watch is only equipped to man three of the nineteen castles on the Wall and those only sparingly.  The North has been bled dry of fighting men by the War of the Five Kings and infighting.  That’s why we need you.”

            _Dragons and their fire would certainly be useful in defeating these dead men._ She raised an eyebrow.  “And why do I need you with your depleted men?”

            Snow levelled with her once more and, looking into his stony eyes with their scars and their severity, she found she believed him.  “If the Wall falls and the North falls, the Army of the Dead will annihilate the continent.  You’ll be ruling over a graveyard.  We may not have the numbers, but we know the North, we know the True North beyond the Wall, and we know the Whitewalkers.  We can provide the strategy if you’ll provide the numbers.”

            This was not what she had come to Westeros for.  This was not what nearly eight thousand Unsullied and forty thousand Dothraki had come to Westeros for.  They had come to conquer, to reclaim, to instill a new world order.  They had not come to fight for their lives in the piercing cold that would decimate her Essosi men against dead men who were near impossible to kill.  So it came down to this: did she believe Jon Snow?  Did this Army of the Dead exist and, if it did, did he really need her to defeat it?

            “Your Grace,” Jon Snow said, a hint of pleading in his gruff voice.  “I know it must seem impossible, but surely the Mother of Dragons cannot dismiss legends as impossibilities.  I would not be here, risking my life by standing before you in defiance if I did not know this to be true and know that my people will all perish if I fail to secure your support.”

            She nodded, then stood slowly.  Her bloodriders and Unsullied captains stood at attention as she addressed Jon Snow.  “I’m sure you understand, Lord Snow, that this is not what my council and I expected to hear when we invited you to Dragonstone.  You will excuse us to discuss this turn of events among ourselves.  In the meantime, I am sure you are weary from your journey.  You will be shown to your rooms and have hot baths and meals brought to you.  We shall speak again tomorrow.”

            Snow swallowed hard, then bent his head in the slightest show of deference and gratitude.  “Your Grace.”

            She nodded to Rakharro, who stepped forward to lead Snow and Ser Davos to their quarters while she and her council retreated to the room of the painted table.  So much for a brief meeting.


	2. Gorgeous Beasts

            She stood at the head of the painted table, staring down at the North, at the forests, the Wall, the keeps and holdfasts.  The land that had rather suddenly become the topic of importance rather than the lion figurines to the south.

            The problem they were discussing had moved abruptly from whether Jon Snow’s words were truth to what they could do to address them.  The council was quiet and severe, staring down at the painted table with her at lands that would fall so quickly if the sparsely populated North was not reinforced.  Tyrion believed Jon Snow’s words, had said as much in the throne room.  Varys believed them too, a spider wary of all forms of magic and eager to see her dragons smite such creatures as Whitewalkers.  The superstitious Dothraki were not hard to convince when they’d been told the tale in their own language.  She was not sure the Unsullied believed the tale out of hand, but they were prepared to follow her without question and if Stormborn believed the northerner, then so did they.

            One of the issues they had expected to face in Westeros was convincing the smallfolk and the lords alike that an army of foreigners and dragons was there to liberate them from Cersei, not conquer them and burn them.  Defeating the Whitewalkers before they could trample the North seemed an excellent way to convince the people that she had their best interests at heart.  The new problem was firstly, how they would defeat the Whitewalkers, and secondly, how they would defeat Cersei after they had given her the time they spent fighting the Whitewalkers to prepare for an invasion.  They would also have to either convince Highgarden, Dorne, and the Iron Islands to support this new course or risk losing those allies.  For her own part, Dany doubted that Dorne and Highgarden would be amenable to this, seeing as they were based so far from the Wall and their support hinged entirely on revenge on Cersei.  The Iron Islands might be more agreeable, assuming they could convince them that it was in the Islanders’ best interest to help.  Snow had not said whether the dead presented a threat to those who lived on islands well away from the mainland, he had only said that they would decimate ‘this continent.’

            They had invited Jon Snow seeking another ally and by doing so had risked losing their existing allies.

            “Olenna Tyrell cares nothing for the future of the realm,” Varys said, his powdered hands folded nervously in front of him.  “She cares only for vengeance.  Fire and blood.”

            “And what of Dorne?”

            “We are already at risk of losing Dorne on account of me being here,” Tyrion pointed out, grimacing as he poured a goblet of wine.  “The moment we turn our attention away from King’s Landing and their revenge, we all but guarantee the Dornish will remain in Sunspear, biding their time until they can strike at my sister another way.”

            “These are women who hide behind stone walls,” Aggo said gruffly.  “They are cowards who will not fight the ice men.”

            “I don’t know that they are cowards,” Tyrion said, raising an eyebrow and likely thinking of the sharp words he’d exchanged with Ellaria.  “They are fierce, but their agendas are not ours.  The moment our goals fail to align is the moment we lose them.”

            “And the Greyjoys?”

            “Who can rely on their ships to carry them to safety?  A people of reavers and rapers cannot be trusted in the first place.”

            “They got us this far.”

            “They were promised the salt throne and a dead uncle.”

            _They sew dragon bearers and drink to your health._   Viserys had been such a fool.  She was finally here in Westeros and the only allies she could find were ones who wanted something from her.  Her Essosi allies were behind her because they believed in her and if she wanted to win Westeros, she would have to make them believe in her rather than bartering with them as she’d bartered with the nobles of Meereen.  She passed to the mouth of the room, looking out on the sea crashing against the rocks of Dragonstone.  She was finally here, but she could feel the Iron Throne slipping beyond her reach again.  White foam crashed into the black stone and the waves carried the surf in and out, hissing like it was boiling as it slid over the rocks.  Viserion flew past, calling to her in a long, cheerful shriek.  “Suppose we defeat these Whitewalkers,” she said, cutting off the council behind her.  “Do we need Dorne or Highgarden or the Iron Islands if we have the North?”

            “We need ships that the Iron Islanders provide,” Tyrion answered carefully.  “And if we want to defeat King’s Landing without frightening the people into riots, we need Highgarden and Dorne.”

            Dany frowned, lost in memories.  Catapulting collars over the walls of Meereen and arming the slaves.  Bidding the Unsullied to kill the masters they despised.  “We don’t need Highgarden and Dorne if we have the respect of the people.  If the stories they trade in taverns are of the dragons that burned the Whitewalkers rather than of the foreigners coming to burn them, we can lay siege to King’s Landing ourselves.”

            Tyrion sputtered.  “But…suppose we can defeat the Whitewalkers and earn the love of the people.  We don’t have enough ships to move the amount of men we’d need in the North without the Iron Islands.”

            Dany turned and stalked back to the painted table, stopping beside Greyworm at the northern reaches of the Narrow Sea.  She pointed a hand to White Harbor and one also to Eastwatch by the Sea.  “We have ships.  All we have to do is ask.”

            “If they need men so badly, why wouldn’t they be willing to offer ships to get them there,” Varys mused.  “It is an interesting thought.”

            “And that is only if our allies cannot be convinced,” Missandei pointed out, eyeing the map with interest.  “A raven could be sent to Sunspear bidding the Greyjoys to return.”

            “So, suppose we have someone help us ferry the Dothraki and Unsullied to Northern soil,” Tyrion said, peering over the rim of his wine goblet.  “How does that help us gain the Iron Throne?  My sister will have had time to prepare and plan.  The city will be fortified, mercenaries bought, and our men will be tired and depleted, not up to several months’ march south to King’s Landing.”

            “We will have the Northmen,” Greyworm said, looking to Dany.  “They will watch Daenerys Stormborn lead Unsullied, Dothraki, and dragons to destroy the ice men and they will follow her as we do.”

            “Snow told us himself that the North is bled dry of fighting men,” Varys said, his forehead creased as if his eyebrows would have risen had he any.

            Dany was still eyeing the painted table and now moved around Greyworm to gesture to Moat Caitlin.  Yes, the North was bled dry, but there were other importances the North could secure them.  Time.  A base on the mainland.  Allies who prided themselves on loyalty.  “No southern army has ever marched north of the Neck.  If we can defeat the Whitewalkers, we can take our time with Cersei.  Perhaps we can even earn back our allies when our agendas merge once more.  We can winter at Winterfell, solidify our alliance with the North, ensure they return to the fold as one of the Seven Kingdoms once a dragon sits on the Iron Throne again.  Then, we ride south and join with whatever armies we can muster.  The Riverlands have reason to rise against the Lannisters now that they don’t have the Freys to fear.  The Lord of the Vale is young and could perhaps be convinced to back us.  And maybe even the Reach and Dorne would be waiting to meet us.”

            They all looked down at the painted table for a long time.  There were so very many variables in this skeleton of a plan that Dany felt her mind spinning like clockwork, gears turning and grinding together.  She poured a glass of wine to oil those gears.  She tried to imagine these Whitewalkers and their Army of the Dead.  Flesh sloughing off of bone that moved.  Hollow eyesockets emitting a blue glow.  Hands blackened with frostbite closing around a living man’s throat.  Half-rotten horses stepping forward through deep snow, never tiring, never complaining.  This was a powerful force, perhaps the most powerful force there had been since the Long Night.

            And she was going to fight it?  With her far fewer men who were used to blazing sun and baked sand?  Snow had better have some good ideas in mind.

            Dany set down her half-empty goblet and returned to the painted table, looking down at the three dragon figurines, the eight horses for the Dothraki, the two helmets for the Unsullied.  She set a helmet and two horses aside on Dragonstone, then slowly swept the remaining figurines north to White Harbor.  A single wolf waited at Winterfell.  “We leave two contingents of Dothraki and the women and children on Dragonstone, where they will be better fed.  The North will be all rocky moors and snow before long.  We also leave one contingent of Unsullied to maintain order.  Those three contingents will hold Dragonstone and respond to any threats from King’s Landing.  The rest of us go north, stopping first at White Harbor.  From there, we travel to either Winterfell on foot or Eastwatch by sea where we will base ourselves.  Lord Snow will be able to give us guidance on which location is more strategically important, whether we need to focus on building up the northern forces and shoring up defenses south of the Wall or whether holding the Wall and ranging beyond it is the greater priority.  Our supply needs will be extensive.  Tyrion, I need you to take point on supply planning.  Varys, I need your little birds in the North to tell us what we’ll find there and I need your birds in King’s Landing to tell us every time Cersei Lannister takes a golden shit.  Greyworm, Rakharro, speak to your captains.  Decide which companies will remain on Dragonstone and appoint your commanders.  You’re both coming north.  Missandei, please inform Lord Snow and Ser Davos that they are invited to a council meeting here tomorrow after breakfast.”

            The council members all bowed their heads and each muttered, “Your Grace,” before standing.  As the other council members exited the room one by one, Tyrion sat down once more and topped off his goblet again.  When all but the two of them had gone, the heavy door clanging shut behind Rakharro, Dany relaxed her posture and moved into the radiant heat of the fireplace.  “I’m curious,” Tyrion said slowly.  “What was it that convinced you?  Was it Lord Snow’s concluding plea?  The thought of resurrected legends like dragons and Whitewalkers?  A lesser woman could be accused of believing him because he’s handsome.”

            Dany looked into the fire and rolled her eyes, knowing he couldn’t see her face.  “Always so tactful.  He is handsome, but if that were enough to convince me of anything, I would not have refused nearly every strategic move that Daario Naharis suggested.  I nursed three dragons at my breast.  If that is true, then why couldn’t Jon Snow have burned a dead man who attacked the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch?  And it makes sense that it would have taken much to cause the Wildlings to band together in so large a force.”

            “Very rational.”  For a moment, they enjoyed a foggy quiet between them.  Dany’s head was still spinning.  She would need to order another wardrobe from Jaahri, the Dothraki woman who acted as her tailor.  They would need to establish trade contracts with their Essosi contacts in order to feed the northern-bound forces.  She would need to consider candidates for other dragonriders.  The way she had come to share a soul with Drogon would not be enough to turn all three dragons into creatures of war.  And if she fell, there needed to be someone who could control the dragons.

            “I know you have a lot on your mind right now,” Tyrion said carefully.  “But there is an obvious path to solidifying the northern alliance.”

            “I know,” Dany said tightly.  She already deeply regretted admitting that Jon Snow was handsome.  Of course, marrying him would be the obvious way to secure the alliance, but she had much on her mind right now and she could see that Snow did as well.  They needed military strategy right now, not political strategy.  “Leave it for now.  We have other concerns.”

            “As you wish.”

            She abandoned her wine and made for the door.  “I need to fly.  Until tomorrow.”

            “Until tomorrow.”

            The dark, stone corridors of Dragonstone felt like arteries.  She could almost feel the castle’s heartbeat as she walked through them, the _click_ of her heels echoing through them, the glow of the torches warming her face.  The castle was shaped like a dragon with wings spread and it felt like its model, like power and warmth incarnate, ready to take flight.

            That was what she needed now.  Not simpering councilors or veiled banter in throne rooms.  She needed power and warmth and cool wind in her face and _flight_.  She needed her other half, needed to feel his might coursing through her veins as they flew together.  Before the dragons, she had ridden her silver from Drogo and thought that the freest feeling in the world.  Now she had Drogon and the silver could never compare.

            Outside, the air was cool and tasted of salt and impending rain.  She could feel eyes on her staring from the windows of the castle, but ignored them with all her might until she was beyond their sight, trekking across the pale grass to the cliffs where the dragons liked to doze.  When she approached, they picked up their heads and whined greetings at her.  Viserion nudged his great, spiny head at her and she cradled his face and petted him, her blood already warming and a smile already stretching across her face.  There were no Whitewalkers, no Cersei Lannisters, no brooding northmen with curls as black as ink.  The world narrowed to her and her children.  Rhaegal nudged her back and she turned so she could give him the same love she gave Viserion.  Drogon waited somewhat impatiently, stretching his muscles and itching for flight.  She stepped forward to him, held his face in her arms and kissed his nose.  His scales were hot and she could almost feel steam in the misty air.  “Hello, love,” she murmured to him, feeling the words reverberate inside him.  His red eyes slid shut and he sighed steaming heat through his nose.  “Shall we fly?  I’ve missed you.”

            Drogon purred and lifted his head, opening his eyes as if waking from a dream.  He shook himself, rolling his shoulders in a way that was almost human.  Then, he bent forward to offer his wing to her.  She clambered up and settled in in her usual spot over his shoulders, taking his spikes in her hands.  She leaned in and whispered to him, “ _Soves._ ”

            Dany held on tight as Drogon turned and lunged to the cliff’s edge, leaping off and unfurling his wings just in time to taste the spray of the water before rising up into the air.  Mist smattered her cheeks and wind cooled her skin even as Drogon’s warmth seeped through her legs and core.  Viserion and Rhaegal screeched in joy and she smiled as they came up on either side, flying with them in a loose formation bound by love and mutual enjoyment of the flight rather than discipline.  Discipline did not come naturally to a dragon.  Drogon lifted his head high and roared as if to agree with her thoughts.  No, a dragon was not a slave.  A dragon was free to do as it willed and damn the consequences. 

            They rose into the darkening sky, chasing the pink and orange sunset, then circling back to meet the indigo twilight descending over Dragonstone.  They rose and fell and cirled back and forth.  Rhaegal showed off for her by flying into a well-executed loop, then screaming his pride.  Viserion tried to mimic him, but spun out and had to right himself before he tumbled towards the earth.  Dany grinned and shook her head at his foolishness, even as he moaned to her and watched Rhaegal fly as if studying him.

            When they returned to the cliffs and Drogon pulled up in a stomping landing, roaring his euphoria and might, she felt like screaming too.  Power and heat blazed in her veins.  She wanted to fly, she wanted to kill, she wanted to fuck.  She felt alive and whole.

            It was as she slid down from Drogon’s back that she saw the white shadow creeping towards them from the direction of the caves.  She paused at Drogon’s side, frowning as she tried to focus on the creature and as the dragons purred a low warning at it.  Glowing red eyes stared back at her through the night and the creature approached in utter silence, without so much as disturbing the grass beneath its feet.  “Ghost!” a gruff voice called urgently.  Something far less graceful than the white beast approached, its legs brushing through the long grass.  The white beast stopped and she realized with a jolt that it was a wolf, a white wolf the size of a small horse.  A man with dark hair in a heavy fur cloak came up on the wolf’s side and his hands sunk into the wolf’s fur.  “Seven hells, Ghost!  You’re going to get yourself burned to a crisp.  Inside now.”

            _Is that Jon Snow?  And is that a fucking direwolf?_   “Who goes there?” she called.

            The man stiffened and his gaze followed her voice, finally seeing her as she stepped out from the cover of Drogon’s wing.  “Your Grace,” Jon Snow said, his northern accent heavier in nervousness.  “I apologize for disturbing you.  Ghost here has been cooped up on the ship for weeks and insisted on doing some exploring.”

            “Ghost?” she asked, her muscles tight with nerves.  “Is he a direwolf?  I thought they were extinct south of the Wall.”

            Snow loosened his grip on the wolf’s ruff and Ghost visibly relaxed his stance.  The dragons had stopped their purring and growling, now sniffing the air and eyeing Snow and the wolf with interest.  “He is.  Most of his siblings are gone now, but each of the Stark children had one at a time.  Their mother was somehow south of the Wall.”

            _He has a pet direwolf._ Her mind ranged wildly back and forth between being stunned and being awed.  She knew what it was to raise a creature that was meant for the wildest of lives.  “Is he friendly?”

            Snow seemed to be eyeing both Ghost and the dragons nervously.  “With those he trusts.”

            Ghost wasn’t behaving in a distrusting manner now and her dragons seemed interested enough in him without feeling threatened or territorial.  She laid a parting hand on Drogon’s cheek, then stepped slowly forward.  She let Ghost take the last few steps to meet her outstretched hand with his large head.  A pink tongue lolled from the side of his mouth, but he remained perfectly silent.  He was warm and his fur was impossibly soft and thick, a coat designed for bitter cold.  She could feel Snow’s eyes on her as she gently stroked Ghost’s ear, then his neck.  “He’s lovely.  I’m surprised you didn’t bring him to court with you.  He might have made a better introduction for you than your Hand.”

            Snow snorted and looked away towards her dragons.  “He might have.  He was so stir-crazy from travelling that he bolted the moment we set foot on land.  I spent the last few hours looking for him.  Wouldn’t want him to be stealing venison from your Dothraki.”

            The image of the fallout from that made her smile.  “No, we wouldn’t want that.  The Dothraki are a superstitious people.  The women would be terrified.”

            “Not the men?”

            “The Dothraki respect only strength.  Show them Ghost is yours and you will have their respect.”  She lowered her hand from Ghost and looked to Snow.  He met her gaze in a moment, but it was clear he’d been staring at the dragons, who were crouched nearby staring shamelessly back at him.  “I won’t pretend my children are friendly.”

            Snow looked back to them, his brow creased and his dark eyes crinkled with thought.  “No, of course not.”  He stepped forward very slowly as she and Ghost watched with wide eyes.  When he was only ten feet from the dragons, close enough to feel the heat of their breath, Viserion shifted forward just slightly and extended his neck to sniff in Snow’s direction.  Dany found herself holding her breath and sweat broke out on her forehead and palms.  Damn Snow.  If he got himself turned to ash, there would be hell to pay from the North.

            But there would be no ash.  Snow extended an open hand to Viserion and she watched in shock as the white dragon nosed his palm, then held himself there and purred ever so softly.

            Hot tears stung her eyes and all the breath left her lungs in a rush.

            Snow took another step forward and stroked Viserion’s snout while Rhaegal and Drogon sniffed at him discreetly, then backed off a step.  Viserion’s eyes slid shut and he rubbed his snout into Snow’s hands.  The King of the North laughed softly and she could see his grin as he turned to rub at Viserion’s neck and lower head spikes.  Tyrion had told her about removing her dragons’ collars, but otherwise they had never allowed anyone close enough to touch other than her and certainly had never demanded affection.  _What in Seven Hells…?_

            “Gorgeous beasts,” Snow said, not turning his attention from Viserion for a moment.  His eyes were only for her gentle-hearted Viserion.

            She took a deep breath and used it to drown the shock inside her.  Then, she returned to Viserion’s side and cradled his jaw in her hands.  With a jolt, she realized that Ghost had followed her and was now sitting nose-to-nose with Viserion.  The white dragon opened its eyes and jerked forward a bit to sniff Ghost intently, then snorted steam at the direwolf, who only stared with his red eyes.  When she found the discipline to look to Snow once more, she found him staring at Ghost and looking as shocked as she felt.  “I guess I needn’t have worried about him getting into trouble.”

            They didn’t discuss the strange interaction as she walked him and Ghost back to the castle, then guided them to Snow’s quarters.  Her brain spun madly trying to find an explanation for the turn of events and it was as they climbed one of the castle’s many stairwells that she finally asked, “Forgive me, Lord Snow, but did you ever know your mother?  I only ask because of the way the dragons reacted to you.”

            Snow didn’t respond for a minute, long enough to make her think she’d offended him, but he finally said, “No.  And I don’t exactly have the look of someone with Valyrian blood if that’s what you mean.”

            He did favor the northern look rather heavily.  Dark hair, dark eyes, solid jawline.  No fine bone structure, no violet tinge to his irises, certainly no silver hair.  “Curious.”

            They reached Snow’s rooms and she paused at the door, finally meeting his gaze in the low torchlight.  His face was open, his dark grey eyes warm and molten, not the steel she’d seen in the throne room.  “I suppose if you were about chasing after Ghost you don’t know,” she said carefully.  “You and Ser Davos are invited to a council meeting I am holding tomorrow morning after breakfast.  We’d like to discuss plans for the northern campaign.”

            Snow’s eyebrows shot up.  “The northern campaign?”

            “Yes.”  She held her voice steady, the voice of a queen, and continued with her queen’s mask upon her face.  “For starters, you will need to rally enough ships to transport thirty thousand Dothraki and four thousand Unsullied, Lord Snow.  And there is the question of which holdfast would serve as an appropriate base, as well as background information on how to kill these ice monsters.  I trust you will be in attendance?”

            He blinked and bowed his head slightly.  “Of course, Your Grace.  I look forward to it.”

            “Good.  Sleep well, Lord Snow.”  She turned on her heel and walked quickly away before she could say or do anything regrettable and refused to acknowledge his quiet words to her back.

            “And you, Your Grace.”


	3. Planning the Northern Campaign

            That night, Dany slept little.  She took a hot bath and tried to slow her spinning mind while Missandei oiled and combed her hair, but could not.  When Missandei left her for the warmth of her own bed, Dany sat in front of her fireplace and sipped a dark red wine much more quickly than usual, hoping to slow her mind down that way.  That didn’t work any better.

            She was finally in Westeros, at Dragonstone, her birthplace, yet she was still years away from the Iron Throne.  The Army of the Dead would no doubt prove impossible to defeat before the rapidly approaching winter, especially since as winter drew nearer, her Essosi armies would lose their advantages faster.  It was all well and good to solidify alliances with the North while wintering with the northerners, but it meant waiting out what could be many years of winter before traveling south to claim her birthright and topple the mad Cersei.

            And Jon Snow had added further confusion to the situation, not just by arriving with his dire news of the Whitewalkers and their plans, but by arriving at all.  The grim and stubborn northerner was likely to be a thorn in her side for quite a long time to come.  He had no respect for her birthright, no respect for her power, and though she’d noticed his eyes widen a bit when he stepped into the throne room, it was clear that he had little respect for her beauty, which had brought Drogo, Daario, Jorah, and others to their knees.  Dany did not think of herself as vain, but she knew what she had and how to use it and clearly the weapons she had used so often in the past would not work on Jon Snow.  The North would not bow to the Dragon Queen out of hand and instead of negotiating as the Ironborn had, Jon Snow was asking favors while offering next to nothing in return. 

            And yet, she could not stop hearing in her mind the way Viserion had _purred_ at Jon Snow’s hand upon his cheek.  Viserion, who together with Rhaegal had burned and ripped apart one of the noblemen of Meereen beneath the Great Pyramid, who had only allowed Tyrion close enough to remove his chains because Tyrion made his intentions clear.  Her dragons had never allowed another’s touch and were unpredictable and untamed.  They obeyed her out of love, not out of deference, and they deferred to no one, rarely even each other.  But Jon Snow of all people merited their respect.

            Perhaps it had something to do with the direwolf, Ghost.  Maybe he had a way with beasts in general.  He kept a direwolf for his companion, after all, and had likely survived other beasts north of the Wall.  But the Dothraki could boast such a trait and none of them dared come within fifty paces of her dragons.  It had to be something more.  She had meant what she said to Snow about the Dothraki respecting him for his relationship with Ghost.  She respected him for it.  Perhaps her dragons felt the same way, or perhaps they had felt that bubble of respect inside her and interpreted it as approval of Snow.

            _The dragon has three heads._

            A northern fool was not one of the three heads.  He could not be…could he?  She had once thought of Daario and Jorah as candidates for those two missing heads.  Perhaps Jon Snow was worthy of consideration.  Getting close enough to touch one of her dragons surely showed him to be deserving of that much.

            She set down her empty wine goblet, her third glass, and stared into the flames, watching the embers shimmer red and black, the flames whisper and dance in the low light.  She reached out and slowly swept her hand through the flames, just to see.  The heat felt like coming home, like crawling into a warm bed after a long day, like that sweet drowsiness after a good fuck, like a long sip of the finest Arbor gold.  It did not burn or singe, only welcomed her like an old friend.

            What must it be like to live in the frigid cold?  To live without warmth, without hot baths and mulled wine and searing sunlight?  What must it be to know only the bitterly cold wind, the whisper of snow, the ache of sore joints and frostbitten fingers, the sear of wind-beaten cheeks?  One would have to be made of stone, or iron. 

            That was what she saw in those grey eyes, even across the throne room, even in the dark night out on the cliffs.  Iron.  Jon Snow had lived for months, years, in a frozen wasteland, had lived a hard life and been hardened by it the way she had been hardened by fire, by abuse, by loss and betrayal.  It was more complicated than that, though.  That she had seen in his eyes as he held her dragon’s head in his arms.  There was so much more there beneath the surface.

            She stretched out her hand into the flames and held it there, shutting her eyes as she reveled in the feel of the flames flickering between her fingers.  It was soothing and yet powerful, like leaning into Drogon’s warmth as they flew together.

            She felt the barely-there caress of smooth fingers on her palm, on the pads of her fingers.  She had never been touched like that and never would be by anything other than flame.  No one would ever cherish the Dragon Queen like something fragile, something worth protecting, something valuable for who she was, not what she was.  She would find someone politically useful to marry, someone sexually satisfying enough to keep her sated, and content herself that Drogo would be the closest she ever came to love.

            Dany slithered out of her chair and onto the plush carpet before the fire.  Carefully, she leaned into the flames to feel their caress on her cheeks, on her neck and face.  No.  No man would ever touch her like that.

           

\----------------------------

 

            The next morning, she asked Missandei to work her hair into a dozen elaborate braids around her head, leaving only deliberate tendrils in careful curls to fall about the high collar of her dress.  This dress has the weight of her new Westerosi gowns and was all black in the fashion she had grown fond of, but the jacket’s fastenings were at the very base of her cleavage and her cape fastened at her hip, sweeping up across her chest and over the opposite shoulder in a way that resembled a warm-weather adaptation of the toqars she had worn in Meereen.  The result was a deep slice of her chest being exposed and her neck being bared save for the silver collar with the three-headed dragon at the base of her throat.  She felt less formal than the day before, more dangerous, the way she liked to feel as she stared down at maps of lands ripe for conquest.  She wanted to feel that power as she stared down at the painted table, as she let Jon Snow lead their strategy session and tell them how great a battle they faced.

            She broke her fast on a few plums they had managed to bring from Essos, then made her way to the Room of the Painted Table.  Tyrion was waiting for her in the throne room, his brow creased over his scar in seriousness.  It was clear he had slept as little as her.  “How would you like to play this?”

            “Let us see how this King in the North handles himself leading a strategy session,” she answered, her boots cracking on the stone floor.  “He has information we require and I want to see what we are dealing with in the way of allies.”

            “A sound strategy.  I have never known you to hand over the reins entirely, though.”

            The corner of her mouth quirked upward and she let him see it.  She gave no verbal answer, but she knew that for her clever Hand, that would be answer enough.  Her life had long been a game, a game of thrones, and the moment she stopped playing was the moment she lost.

            When she entered the chamber, the sound of the surf surged up and she tasted the salt in the air.  She loved this room.  It felt like soaring on Drogon’s back over the waves of the Narrow Sea.  Her entire council was here already, plus the northerners.  Jon Snow stood near the head of the table leaned over Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, both hands splayed on the table’s edge as he studied the North laid out before him from beneath hooded eyes.  He wore no rings and bore scars both old and new on his hands.  Ghost sat at attention at his side, his red eyes watching her carefully as her councilors stared at him in discomfort.  If Snow noticed their reaction, he ignored it.  After all, it had been her who suggested Ghost be at his side within Dragonstone’s walls.  Wolf figurines that closely resembled Ghost had been produced and been placed on the table at Winterfell, White Harbor, Karhold, Last Hearth, and the Dreadfort, though they were few in number.  A few plain black figurines stood at Castle Black and Eastwatch.  Figurines that were uncarved and unpainted had been found, evidently to represent the Army of the Dead, and had been arranged north of the Wall around Hardhome, the last confirmed sighting of the Whitewalkers.

            There were dozens of them.  Well over half the figurines on the table were crowded together at Hardhome, a sight that sent a chill up her spine.

            Her councilors bowed their heads in deference as she entered the room and there were murmurs of “Your Grace” and “Khaleesi.”  Jon Snow stiffened and his eyes snapped to hers.  As he straightened to his full height, his eyes slid over her body, then returned to her eyes as he tipped his head to her.  “Your Grace.”

            The dress had been useful for something more than feeling strong.  He was attracted to her, it just didn’t matter to him the way it had mattered to other men.  She didn’t like to think about manipulating people she had only just met, but things were growing more complicated and Snow was clearly using her armies for his gain.  She needed to know which weapons would be useful if she did have to manipulate him.  So far, she was empty-handed.

            She nodded her head to Snow, but did not speak.  She passed by him and Ghost, allowing the direwolf to sniff her hand in passing, then took her place at the head of the table.  Her councilors took their seats, Snow with obvious uncertainty, and she folded her hands on the table.  “Let’s begin.  At this stage, I am willing to commit thirty-five thousand Dothraki and five thousand Unsullied to the northern campaign.  The remainder will stay here on Dragonstone with the Dothraki women and children.  Ravens have been dispatched to our Ironborn allies, but they have not had ample time to reply.  Our first step should be to determine how to move our forces to the mainland and where to land them.  We only have a handful of Targaryen ships on Dragonstone, the bulk of our navy is Ironborn.”

            “Thank you for your commitment,” Jon Snow said heartily, meeting her eyes as he said it.  She had told him what to expect last night and knew it had shocked him, but she could see how much it meant that she had stood by her word and even upped her contribution since what she’d told him.  “Winterfell is the largest and most defensible castle in the north.  It would serve best as a base of operations.  We will need to disperse forces both along the Wall and in the north, though.  As you can see, the Wall is not properly manned and many of the castles are in disrepair.  That’s our first and best line of defense.  If Your Grace agrees, it would make a great deal of sense to send contingents to the ports at both White Harbor and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, White Harbor destined for Winterfell and Eastwatch destined for the Wall.  The north has a sizeable navy thanks to Stannis Baratheon and would be happy to put it to use transporting the Targaryen forces.”

            He had thought very carefully about every word he said, that she could see.  It was not a canned speech, though.  He genuinely had a highly detailed plan for how to approach this, had likely been working on it for the last few weeks since he decided to answer her summons, and knew his plan well enough to wing a strategy session.  He carried no notes, yet had placed the new figurines with care and offered his suggestions deliberately and with deference, making it clear that they were suggestions only and that the forces were Targaryen.  Perhaps he knew court procedure better than she’d first thought.  “Good.  If we have not heard from the Greyjoys in three days time, we shall send word to your navy.  Time is of the essence, after all.  The Unsullied will go to the Wall.  Their discipline will be put to good use there where they can patrol, range, shore up the old castles, and train Night’s Watch recruits.” 

She looked to Greyworm and he nodded.  “Unsullied are honored to patrol the Wall.  We will hold it to the last man.”

A soft smile lit her face at his determination and the knowledge that what he said was true.  The Unsullied would fight to the last minute to hold the Wall and to fight for her.  “The Dothraki will go to Winterfell, from which they can range across the north in riding parties.  They can move quickly to wherever they are most needed.”

Rakharro pounded his chest in pride.  “We will ride hard for you, Khaleesi.  No part of this land will go unmarked by the hooves of our horses.”

            Snow nodded and his eyes sparked quietly.  “Excellent.  I’m sorry to say that the North does not have the resources to keep forty thousand men fed come winter.”

            “We do,” Tyrion said with a confidence that brought her relief.  “Our Essosi contacts maintain an open supply chain with Draognstone, one that will be extended to the mainland by the Targaryen fleet.  You can rest assured, Lord Snow, that Winterfell’s grain stores need not be tapped on our account.”

            “Then our participation is possible and sustainable,” she concluded, looking to Snow.  “The next question is, how do we defeat this Army of the Dead?  Numbers or not, the Unsullied and Dothraki will be at a disadvantage.  They are not used to the cold and the snows will slow horse travel or stop it entirely.”

            There was a distant screech that she knew to be Rhaegal’s voice and Snow looked beyond her out the mouth of the chamber to the sky beyond.  “Fortunately, you possess three rather large advantages to make up for that.  There are three things that we know kill the dead and fire is one of them.”

            “What are the other two?”

            “Dragonglass and Valyrian steel.”  Snow’s right hand clenched and unclenched reflexively and she saw his eyes dart for a moment to his hip, where he was missing a sword.  “One of my brothers in the Night’s Watch killed a Whitewalker with a dragonglass dagger and I killed one with a Valyrian steel sword.”

            Dragonfire she had, but on the other two weapons she came up empty-handed.  Her jaw tightened and she raised an eyebrow at him, challenging him to produce more resources.  “Unfortunately, we possess neither of those things.”

            “The North is hunting for viable dragonglass mines now and we have learned that there may be a great amount of it buried beneath Dragonstone,” Snow answered, his eyes glinting like steel.  In that moment, she could see he was more intelligent than he let on.  “That is one of the reasons I answered your summons, Your Grace.  I hoped you would allow us to explore the caves and mine whatever dragonglass we find for weapons forging.”

            She blinked once, momentarily caught off guard by the image of black, glinting dragonglass hidden deep beneath the castle.  It made sense, of course, that such a metal would be plentiful on Dragonstone of all places, but it had never occurred to her because she had never known its value before now.  “How quickly can you get started?”

            “With your permission.”

            “You have it.”

            Rhaegal screeched again and Viserion answered him cheerfully.  They must be playing now, spinning and twisting in the air together.  A shot of fear arced along her nerve-endings and she saw, burned onto her retinas, the image of Drogon screaming in pain as the Sons of the Harpy buried spears in his shoulders and back.  “What kind of weaponry can we expect from the dead?”

            Snow frowned down at the table.  “Primitive at best.  The dead are mostly former Wildlings, who have limited weapon-forging capabilities.  Axes, spears, broadswords.  Few archers, no crossbowmen.  No longswords or cavalry.  Just footsoldiers relying on numbers and the Walkers themselves.”

            “Your Grace,” Missandei said softly, worry thick in her voice.  Dany met her dark eyes and saw the fear there.  She felt it in her own heart too.  “Even if these dead men lack archers, there may be powerful spearmen or weapons Lord Snow is not aware of.  If the dragons are to fight, they should be armored, as should you.  The risk is too great.”

            “The most important person in the world can’t go to the most dangerous place in the world,” Tyrion said, setting down his wine goblet sharply in his unease.  “The dragons and their mother should remain at Winterfell unless the Wall falls.  If the Wall holds, there is no need to battle these dead men, nor to risk yourself.”

            Her heart was in her throat.  She looked to Snow, as did everyone else.  He was staring down at Hardhome, his eyes far away.  Softly, he said, “It won’t hold.  We are facing the Long Night, what might be the longest winter in centuries.  The Whitewalkers will only grow in power and they have plenty of time.  And if the Shivering Sea were to freeze at all…they could walk right around the Wall.”

            Her eyes fell shut and she saw on the backs of her eyelids the snow stretching out miles around beneath Drogon’s wings, dotted with shadowy figures with crude weapons and glowing blue eyes.  “What do you suggest?”

            Snow did not answer for a long while, not until Ghost nudged his elbow with his head.  Then, Snow looked to her, his eyes only for her, the council falling away.  “We need the dragons from the get-go, while we’re still in some control of the situation.  Best case scenario, we defeat the dead before the Wall falls and no smallfolk need die.  The only way we can do that is if the dragons range north of the Wall on raids.”

            The council erupted.  Rakharro was on his feet, boasting that the Khaleesi and her dragons would roasted these dead men alive in a matter of days.  Varys was simpering and fussing while Misandei pleaded with her not to even consider it.  Tyrion joined her, all but shouting across the table at her not to go.  Her eyes were still fixed on Jon’s.

            She had never been in battle, had never swung a sword.  Her dragons and her flight skills had been battle-tested at Meereen and had done well opposed only by the Wise Masters’ trebuchets, but that was not the same as leading raids, likely without backup, against dead men north of the Wall.  Would the dragons even be able to function well in such cold?  They seemed fine on Dragonstone, but that was nothing compared to what awaited them.  And though she knew political and broad military strategy, she knew little of battles.  She held up a hand for silence and when it was achieved, she folded her hands and stood to turn and watch her children as they swooped low over the water, fishing.  “The dragons are not battle-ready.  As Missandei said, they lack armor and two of them lack riders.  We will begin by fortifying the Wall and the north.”

            “Who would you have ride them?” Varys asked in disbelief.  “You are the last Targaryen, Your Grace, none of your commanders possess Valyrian blood.”

            _Jon Snow’s hand on Viserion’s snout as he purred._   “Valyrian blood may not be one of the required traits of a dragonrider.  The question will require time and consideration.”

            “My brother, Samwell Tarley, is at the Citadel.  I could send a raven asking that he research the subject,” Snow offered uncertainly.

            She nodded, refusing to turn and risk looking any of them in the eye.  She could not let them see what she was thinking because she did not know what she was thinking.  She was well out of her element and felt sick at the thought of her children put in mortal danger, even as part of her blazed with righteous fury, ready to burn these dead men where they stood and get them out of the way of her ambitions.  “That would be very helpful.”

            The council and the northerners wisely backed off the subject of the dragons and turned to the details of supply routes, placement of contingents, and troop movements.  She listened and absorbed the conversations and debates even as her mind spun with questions, images, half-formed plans.  How low to the ground would the dragon need to be to burn the dead men to death?  Were there forests north of the Wall where the dead could be trapped and burned more easily?  Would it be possible to extend the Wall into the sea farther as a preventative measure in case the sea did freeze?  Would the Dothraki still follow her unconditionally once they were loosed to range in the north, or would new potential khals begin to pillage the towns and rise against her?  What would Cersei Lannister be doing while all this went on?

            Drogon roared and made a low fly-by past her.  He felt her anxiety and wished to burn whoever had caused it. 

            She pushed a subconscious suggestion to him that there would be plenty of _dracaryses_ to go around soon.  A roar that made the stones of the castle quiver echoed around them and power rippled through her veins, bringing a dangerous smile to her lips.  Her muscles tensed with determination and she turned to her council, who immediately quieted.  Her eyes were for Jon Snow alone as she said, “I will range north with the dragons.  But the north must supply a dragonrider, someone who knows the terrain well and can guide us from above.  When you choose someone, the dragons and I will leave Dragonstone, and not before.”  Anxiety crept into Snow’s eyes, but otherwise he hid it well.  She looked to a very worried Missandei and said, “Missandei, please speak to my wardrobe master and the armorer.  I will need a northern wardrobe, armor for myself, and armor for the dragons.  Thank you all for your council.”

            The council stood, a cloud of anxiety choking the room, and one by one they departed to their tasks.  She turned once more to watch her children fishing and it took her a moment to realize she was not alone.  “Thank you,” Snow’s gruff voice said from behind her.  “I know this isn’t what you signed on for when you sailed for Westeros.  You would have stayed in Essos had you known.”

            She frowned and thought for a moment, then turned to face Snow.  They were alone save for Ghost and she could see he stood taller with an ounce less tension now that the room was quiet.  “This my home, not Essos.  I would have hesitated at bringing the people who follow me here to suffer and die, but I would have come all the same.  I won’t see my people freeze and die.”

            Snow’s smile settled into a grim smile.  “If that’s true, then you might be Queen of all seven kingdoms yet, Your Grace.”

            For a moment, they just looked at each other and the moment hung in the air, buzzing with electricity and significance.  Then, Snow turned and exited the room, Ghost at his heels.

            It was when she was completely alone that she realized her skin was prickling with heat and the space below her stomach had gone warm and molten.  She choked on the attraction and stalked from the room, intent on a swift, high flight with Drogon to clear her head.


	4. An Agreement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is from Jon's POV, which will happen from time to time in this work. It should shed some light on what's going on inside his broody mind.

            Dragonstone was larger and wilder than he had imagined, an island of crags and cliffs, caves and crevices, with moors and sandy beaches in between.  He and Ghost didn’t pause for a moment as they exited the Room of the Painted Table and escaped the castle, intent on some sharp, salty air and silence.

            There was a very good chance he had made a complete ass of himself in that strategy session.  The last one he had led had been for the Battle of the Bastards and that had gone over like a ton of bricks.  He knew this opponent far better than he’d known the Boltons, though, and he hoped it had shown.  He’d nearly choked when the queen’s translator…Missandei?... challenged his description of the Army of the Dead’s weaponry.  The worst part was she wasn’t wrong.  He knew little about what the dead and the Whitewalkers were really capable of.  An image sliced into his head of Mance Rayder’s giants firing arrows six feet long at Night’s Watch men.  If there were giants among the dead and they still possessed their weapons, would one of those arrows be capable of injuring or killing a dragon?  Surely not, but the concern he’d seen on Daenerys’s face had been very real.  For such a stoic person to show such uncertainty suggested that it was physically possible to injure the dragons with mundane weapons.

            _Daenerys._   Seven Hells.  She was _the queen_ , not _Daenerys_.

            She was a lot of different things, a person with as many facets as a diamond.  He was beginning to see just how many sides she had and how very deliberately she chose which side to show.  That had been no accident that she’d let Ghost sniff her hand as she walked past them, smelling of sharp, eastern spices that made his head spin.  The only moment he was fairly sure he’d seen the real Daenerys, if there was a soft underside to her, was when she’d watched him pet her dragon and, for just a split second, had all but melted.

            Gods, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.  That was the other thing that kept distracting him in the Room of the Painted Table, was the dragons swooping around just outside.

            He would have to ask her their names.  He suspected most people saw them as entities, not creatures, and that they were _dragons_ , not individual beasts with individual souls.  He knew Ghost like he knew himself, though, and when he’d been so close to the dragons, he’d felt like he could know them that way too.  He could feel the arrogance and power of the black one, the playfulness and pride of the green one.  And the white one, the dragon kissed by ice who reminded him so much of Ghost…he could feel the quiet intelligence, the longing for something more, the fierce protectiveness tempered by tenderness, the wild nature tamed by a need for affirmation.

            It reminded him of who he himself had been not long ago, of who he still was sometimes in his more vulnerable moments.

            Even now, as he climbed down a rocky crag with Ghost towards a deserted beach, he could feel the burning-hot scales, so smooth on their plates with sharp edges that scraped.  He could feel the warmth seeping into his veins, bringing a pliability and life to his muscles that he had not felt since before he left for the Wall, perhaps in his entire life.  And those eyes piercing right through his soul, that heartbeat under his hands and that hot breath on his face…it was so impossibly real and so magical.  It was the opposite extreme to what he’d felt as he locked blades with the Whitewalker at Hardhome, that shock and fear and power.  It was strange and all-consuming.

            _Not unlike her…_

            Seven Hells.

            Jon could not say that he’d set his eyes on many women in his life.  Ygritte had been beautiful, he thought, in her rogueish way.  Sansa was beautiful.  But this woman with blazing violet eyes that challenged him every step of the way, moonstruck hair in such perfectly designed styles that made him want to make a mess of it, a body that hummed with power and sex hidden under soft fragility…there wasn’t anything like her in the world, of that he was sure.  And he could tell with that first look at her that the moment he let her know how she got to him was the moment she ate him alive.

            There were more important things.  He could not afford to make an ass of himself tripping over his tongue trying to impress a beautiful woman.  Not when she was the only person in the world who could help him fight the Night King and maybe, just maybe, win.

            He tossed a rock into the water and watched it disappear.  He had never learned how to skip rocks.  Bran could, though.

            He didn’t have time for grief either.  He’d cried a thousand tears for his family when Ghost was gone hunting and he was lying in an ice-cold bed alone wondering what the fuck he was doing.  He had not gone south when his father was murdered, not when Robb went to war, not when Winterfell burned and Bran and Rickon with it, not when Robb and his wife and mother were murdered, not when his sisters disappeared, and, in the end, he’d been repaid for his loyalty with a knife to the heart.

            Ghost padded back to him and nudged his hand with his head, breaking him out of those dark, ugly memories.  He followed the direwolf to a narrow cave in the cliffside and they slipped into the darkness.  Ghost’s white fur reflected what little light there was as his eyes adjusted and they crept in further.  He laid a hand on the wall and ran it along the rock face as they walked, feeling for the warm, smooth texture of dragonglass.  Ghost paused and Jon stopped beside him, sliding his hand over the stone until he found the shimmering river of obsidian that carved its way through the rock.  His heart hammered in his ears and he extended both hands to judge the size of the deposit.

            This was the third cave they’d found on the island with dragonglass out of five tries and they hadn’t even searched with the help of a torch or another human yet.  Sam had been right; there were probably tons of dragonglass here and he now had official permission to mine it.

            Jon padded at his jerkin, looking for something to use to break off a piece of the glass, and ended up unclasping his belt and using the heavy buckle.  He itched to ask for the return of Longclaw and his daggers, but he knew that he was pushing his luck with every breath he took here.  Daenerys had given him an awful lot in return for nothing and it was going to bite him in the ass soon.

            Just like thinking of her as _Daenerys_ would bite him in the ass.

            He managed to crack off a shard of dragonglass and handled it very carefully as he reclasped his belt.  Dragonglass was fragile, but wicked sharp, and he didn’t fancy losing a finger here where he couldn’t at least see it to retrieve it and have it stitched back on.

            Ghost nudged his elbow again and stood up on his hind legs, front feet clawing at the stone.  Jon frowned and felt at the wall.  No dragonglass there, but on closer inspection, he could feel something carved into the stone.  He’d have to come back with a torch to see it.

            Jon and Ghost exited the cave, squinting into the harsh sunlight that had washed over the island as the clouds cleared this morning.  On top of the Wall, the sun was hot enough to scorch your skin and set it to peeling if you weren’t careful and Jon suspected that this level of sunlight was much the same.  The dragons weren’t wheeling around the skies anymore.  Maybe they had found a beach to sunbathe on.

            Ghost dashed forward to the edge of the sea and stared up at the blue sky.  A moment later, a screech echoed through the air and Jon watched as the dragons swooped around the island, high above the white-capped waves.  A shimmer of silver glinted on the back of the black dragon and his blood simmered under his skin.  Ygritte had been kissed by fire, but was there anything sexier than a woman who rode dragons, who had bent fire to her will?

            Seven Hells.

            Jon turned on his heel and began the climb back up the cliffside, making note of which beach this was and how to get back to the cave.  Ghost hesitated before following him and Jon got the sense that Ghost envied the dragons their wings.  There was perhaps only one creature more free than a direwolf and it was a dragon.

            He needed to think of something to offer in exchange for the Targaryen forces on loan, in exchange for putting the dragons and their mother at risk.  Daenerys had requested a northern dragonrider and he could see in the way she looked at him that she expected him to offer himself for the post.  That would certainly even the scales a bit, though he seriously doubted the likelihood of his surviving such an ordeal.  There was a big difference between petting a dragon and climbing on its back.  And if he with his northern blood could pet a dragon, perhaps anyone with the right disposition could get away with it.

            So what else could he offer?  She’d told him herself that she’d expected him to bend the knee to her and it seemed like the most obvious option.  Would the northern lords accept such an action, though?  Or would they rebel against him and Daenerys?  They didn’t have the men, of course, but they might be stubborn enough to die trying.  Lady Mormont and Lord Glover likely were.  Perhaps they’d name Sansa Queen in the North and be done with him.  Northerners were loyal to their own, not to bastards who bowed to dragon queens.

            Jon sighed, his face scrunching up in thought.  He could marry her.  That would be a good way to soften the blow for the northern lords.  Bending the knee wasn’t so bad if you bending it to your wife and you were standing next to the Iron Throne with her.  It somehow seemed unlikely that Daenerys would accept such an offer, though.  It would put her claim to the throne at some risk and would muddy the definition of “bending the knee.”  Plus, there were other lords out there who could probably be of strategic value.  He tried ticking them off in his head and realized quickly that that might not be the case.  Jaime Lannister was the enemy.  Loras Tyrell was dead.  Oberyn, Doran, and Trystane Martell were dead.  She’d apparently had opportunities to solidify an alliance with Theon Greyjoy or Euron Greyjoy and she was still unwed.  Robert Arryn or Petyr Baelish could be considered keys to the Vale, but if the Greyjoys with their navies weren’t good enough, surely Lord Robert or Littlefinger would be even less suitable.

            They had spoken of sending ravens to the Greyjoys as if there was a chance they wouldn’t return.  Did Daenerys fear losing her Westerosi allies?

            She’d been here for weeks and not burned anything with her dragons, not stormed anything with her thousands of Unsullied and Dothraki.  She had stayed in Slaver’s Bay for years presumably establishing peace in the region.  He thought of the way she’d insisted that she would have come to Westeros knowing about the Army of the Dead.  _My people._   If she didn’t see herself as a conqueror, maybe she felt she needed Westerosi allies to secure the Iron Throne and avoid a grassroots revolt.

            If this was a game of politics and loyalty rather than numbers, there was no better ally than the North.

            “Ugh.”  Jon raked a hand through his increasingly knotted black hair.  The wind was making hell of it, bun or no.

            He didn’t like the idea of an arranged marriage, even if he was the one doing the arranging.  Hells, if he had figured out it would be a good match, surely Tyrion was whispering it in Daenerys’s ear too.  Still, he had had real love once and no contrived political match would ever stack up to what he’d had with Ygritte.  No woman would ever love him or need him like that again.  No woman would love him so much that even as badly as he’d hurt her, she’d been unable to kill him, unable to even wound him when they met for the last time at Castle Black.  He would never forget what it felt like to lie under the furs with her at night and not feel alone, to be with someone who loved him, even if she didn’t want to believe who he really was.

            “You look like you’re thinking quite hard about something.”

            Jon turned to face Daenerys… _the queen_ …as she approached.  In the distance, the dragons were sunning themselves on the edge of the cliff, the white one rubbing his face into the tall grass not unlike the way Ghost did.  The queen was badly windswept, her silvery hair escaping the careful braids in wild tendrils that made her look untamed.  Her violet eyes were brighter than they’d been in the Room of the Painted Table, alight with power and adrenaline from her flight.  In a way, she reminded him of the way Ygritte had looked in that cave, tousled and wild and hungry.  “I am.”

            Daenerys caught up to him and they walked side-by-side, Jon carefully looking down at Ghost rather than at her.  “Oh?  If we are to be allies, it would be wise to share the things we think so hard about.”

            Allies.  Perhaps that was what she was looking for.  Jon didn’t care for these court games, though, preferring to be up-front and honest with those he dealt with.  “What is it that you want from me, Your Grace?”

            Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her blink, the only reaction she allowed to slip through the cracks.  “What do I want from you?”

            “Yes.  I know that I have put you in an unfair position.  You expected me to come here to bend the knee…is that what you want from me in return for fighting the Army of the Dead with us?”

            She was quiet for a moment, then said carefully, “I want what every monarch wants, Jon Snow.  Loyalty.”

            _Loyalty._   That was not the same thing as a bent knee.  If he understood one thing, it was that loyalty was far more complicated than that.  “The northern lords will not bow to a southern ruler, nor to a king who bends the knee to a southern ruler.  Not after all they have suffered.  Your father murdered my uncle and grandfather…I may not judge you guilty of his crimes, but they will still not be so easy for the northern lords to forgive.”

            Daenerys stopped and looked at him levelly, her gaze alone bringing him to a standstill.  He couldn’t escape her eyes.  “They don’t have to forgive my father.  They need only understand that I am not him.  That is one reason why I have pledged my forces to the fight against the Army of the Dead.  A megalomaniac would melt the Red Keep, take the Seven Kingdoms by force, and leave the North to its fate.  I will save the North, liberate the Seven Kingdoms the way I did Slaver’s Bay, and sit on the throne my ancestor Aegon built.”

            “And what is loyalty?  Is it a bent knee in the hall at Winterfell with your court and mine looking on?”

            Daenerys smiled.  It was an almost eerie smile, like she was holding back some complicated thought process that he could not hope to unravel.  “That would be an excellent show of _your_ loyalty, Jon Snow, but would it secure the North’s loyalty?  If what you say is true, perhaps not.  Loyalty is bought only through deeds, not through negotiation.  We will fight the dead together and, as you said, I might be queen of all seven kingdoms yet when your northern lords watch my dragons burn the Whitewalkers and their foot soldiers.”

            “You will have their respect, certainly,” Jon said carefully, knowing he was treading on dangerous ground.  “But I suspect you have a surer plan of winning the loyalty of the North, the kind of loyalty that will be worth something when you march south again.”

            The queen tilted her head and raised an eyebrow, that smile still present on her lips.  Was it…appreciation?  Respect?  “I had a thought in mind.”

            “It would be wise to share the things we think so hard about,” he said, unable to suppress the tiniest smirk.

            Daenerys began walking forward again and he kept pace with her.  “We’ll be married at Winterfell, in the sight of your gods and your lords.  The North may not bow to a southern ruler or a northern king who bows, but perhaps they will bow to a southern queen who takes a northern king for her consort.  Was your father’s post as Hand of the King the closest House Stark ever came to the throne?”

            He couldn’t help a chuckle.  “You already know the answer to that.”

            “Then it’s settled?”

            This time, it was Jon who stopped and turned to the queen…Daenerys.  When he looked her in the eyes, it wasn’t with the fear or nerves or lust that he had felt at points in the last two days.  It was with respect for this clever, ambitious woman.  “We’ll be married at Winterfell, in the sight of my gods, my lords, your councilors and your bloodriders.  I will not bow to you, but the North will bow to _us._   You’ll have your loyalty when the Army of the Dead is defeated.”

            She extended a hand to him, her violet eyes dancing.  “Agreed.”

            Jon took her hand in hers and held her gaze as he kissed her knuckles.  “Agreed…my queen.”


	5. Alliances Burned and Born

            It had been more of a business transaction than a marriage proposal, and yet Dany felt worlds happier about the outcome than she had expected.  As Jon Snow kissed her hand, his dark grey eyes liquid like a great storm rolling in, she tried to think of what made this match feel so different than Daario or Drogo.  Perhaps it had to do with what it was built upon: mutual respect for each other as people and as monarchs.  Her relationship with Daario had been built wholly on lust that she only realized wasn’t love when she left him.  As for Drogo, the marriage had begun entirely one-sided with her suffering terribly as a result.  Maybe this match would be better.

            Snow released her hand, the corner of his mouth tilted just barely upward as if his thoughts were not so far off from hers.  They began walking slowly towards the castle once more and she asked him, “What were you doing down on that beach?  It did not look like an easy climb.”

            Snow shrugged.  “It wasn’t so bad.  After climbing the Wall, I’ll never look at an obstacle the say way again.”

            She stopped right in her tracks, unable to hide her shock.  _Climbing the Wall?_ He must have meant on the stairs at Castle Black, but she couldn’t help thinking of the stories of Wildling raiders that literally climbed the Wall.  “What do you mean, you climbed…”

            Snow flushed just barely enough to notice.  “I mean with picks and ropes when I was undercover with the Wildlings.  The bastards cut us loose hallway up when a fissure opened in the Wall and I think I’ll have nightmares about that until I die.”

            Her eyebrows shot up.  She couldn’t help it, not as she pictured Snow halfway up the 700-foot Wall of glistening ice, hanging on by nothing but picks and a rope.  “Who cut you loose?  How did you survive?”

            He snorted, looking off into the distance as if seeing the Wall again.  “One of the Wildlings I was with cut me and…the Wildling below me loose so we wouldn’t drag them down.  Luckily, I had a decent grip when they did it.  We had to climb the rest of the way just the two of us.”

            “Gods,” she murmured.

            “Anyway, Ghost and I have started exploring the caves.”  Snow took a moment to dig beneath his cloak and produced a shining sliver of black rock.  “Careful, it’s sharp.”

            Dany took the shard of obsidian from him and examined it up close.  It did look wicked sharp and was surprisingly light and fragile.  “Dragonglass.  You were right, it is here.”  Snow nodded and she gave the shard back to him, imagining the rock glistening inside the caves like black rivers.  “Will you show me?”

            Snow’s eyebrows went up and he nodded.  “Of course.”

            She led the way back to the castle at a swift march and swiped a torch from the nearest doorway to bring back to the cave.  Snow carried the torch and led the way down to the cave, turning around every other step to watch her traverse the sharp rocks and sliding gravel.  She was wearing the wrong shoes for the trek, but kept her footing and they made it to the mouth of the cave with no mishaps.  Ghost led the way in, his red eyes glowing in the dark as he moved confidently around the puddles and drips from the stalactites.  They didn’t have to go far before Snow paused and nodded to the stream of obsidian slicing through the volcanic rock.  “It’s a larger deposit than I thought.  It looks like it reaches deeper into the cave.”

            They moved slowly deeper in and Dany paused every few steps to squint through the torchlight at carvings on the walls, hieroglyphs and artwork in geometric patterns.  She noticed Snow eyeing them too and asked softly, “Who do you think left these?  The Children of the Forest?”

            Snow nodded, frowning at a spiral shape as if it disturbed him.  “It must have been.”

            They edged deeper into the cave as it narrowed, forcing them to walk single-file, climbing over rocks and puddles.  Dany’s boot slipped once on a slick rock and Snow spun around fast enough to grab her by the elbow and steady her.  His grip was strong, used to the weight of a sword, and she was surprised at the way her arm tingled at the contact.  “Thank you.”

            It was only a few steps later that the passage opened up into a great cavern.  They froze and Dany’s breath caught in her throat as she stared upwards.  It was like looking up into a temple, all glistening, sparkling black rock in shining rivulets along the walls.  Great columns stretched upward, the nearby walls worn away by dripping water until only gleaming dragonglass remained.  “Gods,” Snow murmured softly, his voice echoing through the cavern.  “We’ll have all the dragonglass we’ll ever need.”

            Ghost sniffed the cool air as if he’d caught a trail.  He padded into the cavern, silent despite the puddles of water and fine gravel.  Snow’s eyes darted to follow him and soon his feet did the same.  “What is it, Ghost?”

            Ghost led them through the cavern and into another small passageway cutting deeper into the ground.  The rock overhead began to close in and Dany and her breath became labored, but she pushed on.  She missed the open sky, fresh air, and Drogon’s wings stretched out beneath her.  Fortunately, Ghost stopped not far in, staring at the wall.  Snow lifted the torch and she heard his breath catch in his throat.

            On the wall were more carvings, these of humanoid creatures, some quite short and some quite tall.  “The Children and the First Men?” she suggested quietly.

            “Perhaps,” Snow said distractedly.  “But they weren’t the only ones here.”  His eyes were directed just to the right of the figures, farther into the passageway.  He held out the torch farther and an icy chill ran down her spine.  There was a group of figures, tall and clearly skeletal in form.  Their eyes were painted a searing blue and they seemed to stare right through her soul with a hate that pierced the heart and sent her breath leaving her lungs in a whoosh. 

            _Gods…they were real._

            “That’s what you saw?” she whispered, as if the slightest sound could awaken the carved creatures.  “The Whitewalkers?”

            Jon nodded grimly and looked back to the other figures.  He stretched out a hand and laid it on the carving, tracing an arm.  “They fought together, the Children and the First Men, against a common enemy.”

            “And if we’re going to survive, we must do the same,” she finished.  She felt her muscles tightening to iron and her voice levelled out as she spoke with resolve.  Whatever magic had brought these monsters into being, she would not allow them south of the Wall.  They would never terrorize her people, not as long as she had anything to say about it.  Jon looked to her sharply and she met his gaze as her jaw hardened to stone.  “We’ll fight them together and we’ll defeat them together.”  Jon’s eyes softened as he looked at her and she felt her muscles softening once more under his scrutiny.  “What is it?”

            He shook his head once and his brow creased as if in concentration or confusion.  He seemed to agonize over his words for a minute before he finally spoke them.  “I can see why your people follow you.  You’re an easy person to believe in.”

            Warmth expanded inside her chest and she had to swallow hard to choke it down.  “I try to be.  It was you who convinced me first, though, Jon Snow.”

            Jon took a step towards her so he could feel his breath warm on her face.  She found herself studying him, the scars over his smoke-filled eyes, the deep creases in his brow that told of too much stress on a young life, the grim set to his mouth, the inky curls that were breaking free of their ties.  Her mouth went dry.  Then, he cleared his throat, looked sharply away, and started back the way they had come.  “We should get back.  The sun will be setting soon.”

            It was as they exited the cave and doused the torch in the sand that Dany spotted Aggo and Rakharro approaching them at a run.  A sick twisting feeling clenched her gut and she stopped in her tracks to watch them approach.  “Khaleesi!” Aggo called.  “There is news from the Ironborn.”

            She blinked, her expression shutting down as she swallowed her emotions.  They would not be running about the island searching for her with anything less than earth-shattering news.  “What has happened?” she asked in Dothraki.

            Rahkarro’s brow was scrunched into canyons and his dark eyes bled as he answered in his own tongue, “They are gone, Khaleesi.  Defeated at sea by our enemies.”

            Her eyes went wide in horror as she watched the ships burn in her mind’s eye, men screaming and leaping to drown in the sea rather than burn on the decks.  “Did they make it to Sunspear?  What of the Greyjoys?  Ellaria and the Sand Snakes?”

            Rahkarro shook his head grimly.  “All killed or captured, Khaleesi.  They were still north of Sunspear when the demons struck.”

            Dizziness fell over her like a thick haze and she looked down at the sand to steady herself.  “What is it?” Snow asked, his voice rough with worry and mounting anger at whatever had transpired.  “What happened?”

            “The fleet was destroyed before it reached Sunspear,” she said, her voice tight.  Her chest felt like someone was sitting on her, crushing her.  “The Greyjoys and the Sands are all dead or captured.”

            There was a moment of heavy silence that felt too short, like she needed time to sit down and process what this meant.  Snow took a step towards her and asked anxiously, “They weren’t your only allies?  Were they?”

            “We still have Highgarden,” she said.  “Olenna Tyrell was returning to Highgarden by land.  The Iron Islands are now fully under Euron Greyjoy’s control and he has evidently thrown in his lot with Cersei.  Dorne will be in a state of chaos when word gets out.  The Martells are gone and everyone else will be fighting for what’s left of the country.  But the Queen of Thorns is alive.”

            “This old woman with her great stone house cannot be trusted, Khaleesi,” Rakharro said sharply, evidently recognizing Olenna’s name.  “She cares only for vengeance and not upon the frozen men.”

            “You’re right, blood of my blood,” she said in the Common Tongue, meeting Rakharro’s dark eyes.  Rakharro nodded his understanding and she looked to Snow, his brow creased in worry.  “Fortunately, we have enough men to keep Dragonstone safe while we are in the North.  When these ice men are gone, the North will stand with us.”

            Snow nodded once, seriously, as her blood riders looked on.  “You have my word.”

            That brought the tiniest smile to her face.  “And the word of a Stark is worth more than the mines of Casterly Rock.  We must return.  Tyrion will be tearing his hair out.”

            They did return to the castle and found her councilors and their Hands waiting in the Room of the Painted Table.  As they watched in grim silence, Dany carefully removed the sun and spear of House Martell from the map, and brought the krakens down to one.  “The dragons and I will range south to determine the size of Euron Greyjoy’s force.”  She looked to Snow and asked, “How soon can we have northern ships to Dragonstone?”

            Snow looked to Davos, who was measuring the map with his eyes.  “The White Harbor fleet can be here in two weeks with the best winds, four with storms or weak winds.  The Eastwatch fleet will take at least four weeks, more likely five or six.”

            She shook her head and took in the way her councilors all stiffened at the news.  “That’s not fast enough.  We have to find a way to get the forces meant for the northern campaign away before Greyjoy besieges the island.  We can pull back the forces and smallfolk meant to stay here to the keep if need be, but we feed well over fifty-thousand souls without our supply line and we can’t risk a prolonged siege preventing us from going north.”

            “The Vale is undeclared, Your Grace,” Varys said softly.  “Most of their fighting men are still in the North, but there must be a small fleet on the coast.  We could look to them for aid.”

            Tyrion shook his head.  “Not like this.  The Vale remained out of the War of the Five Kings even with Lysa Arryn’s family being butchered and Littlefinger whispering in her ear.  They won’t risk their ships for us."

            She looked to Groleo, her master of ships, and watched him shift nervously from his right foot to his left.  “Is the Targaryen fleet capable of challenging the Greyjoys at sea before they reach us?”

            Groleo stared down at the single kraken on the table, shaking his head slowly.  “To have defeated over a hundred ships, Greyjoy must have a formidable navy, Your Grace.  Your best fighting forces are not well-suited to sea battle and we don’t have enough ships to make a challenge on numbers alone.  I may be an Essosi captain, but I know what the Greyjoys are capable of at sea.”

            She ground her teeth together and glared down at the kraken.  Her blood had begun to boil and she couldn’t help snapping out, “Our allies have been murdered, our fleet decimated, and now all our plans are threatened by a coming siege.  We cannot do nothing.”

            “The dragons.”

            Dany looked to Snow, who was also staring down at the Painted Table, but at Hardhome, not the Narrow Sea.  His face was pale and he looked faintly ill, but held his voice level as he said, “The dragons could burn the Greyjoy fleet the way they burned the Masters’ at Meereen.”

            Righteous fury and resolve simmered in her blood and she looked to Drogon, who had taken flight upon feeling her anger and was circling the castle.  The dragons could burn the Ironborn they way they had the Masters’ ships and it would be oh-so-satisfying.

            “The dragons are not battle-ready,” Missandei said sharply.  “We just had this discussion.”

            Snow met Missandei’s eyes with a bladelike gaze.  “We can’t risk being besieged on this island and Euron Greyjoy would be a fool to do anything other than besiege it now when we are vulnerable.  The war with Cersei could be over before it even starts and the war against the dead could be over too if we can’t get to the north in time.  The dragons could fly south with the Targaryen fleet as support and burn enough ships to convince the Ironborn to turn for home.”

            “Your Grace,” Tyrion said, his voice heavy with grimness.  “Lord Snow is right that we cannot afford a siege.  If our supply routes are cut off we’ll scarcely last a month with all the mouths we have to feed here.”

            Dany met Tyrion’s gaze and nodded once curtly.  “Fine.  There will be no siege.  Missandei, did you speak to the armorer?”

            “I did, Your Grace.  He anticipates the order taking two weeks.”

            “Please tell him to streamline his plans for the designs, whatever he has drawn up, and have everything battle-worthy as soon as possible.”  Missandei nodded, her face crinkled with worry.  Dany then looked to a very pale Groleo and a resolute Greyworm and said, “Get the Targaryen fleet outfitted for battle.  The Unsullied will be our sea-borne fighting force…get them trained and ready to ship out as soon as the dragons are prepared.”  Next, she looked to Davos.  “Ser Davos, send word to White Harbor and Eastwatch.  Tell them we need sea support as soon as they can get here with whatever provisions they can provide.  We’ll need to stock Dragonstone for a siege in case all we achieve is slowing the Ironborn down.  Tyrion, send word to Essos to redraw our supply routes heading first to White Harbor and second to Dragonstone.  If Dragonstone is besieged, we can keep their provisions at White Harbor until we have an opportunity to break the siege lines.”  Finally, she looked to Snow, her heart pounding in her head and her jaw made of iron.  “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to choose a dragonrider?”

            His grey eyes glinted with the light of battles won and lost.  “I have.”

            She tilted her head, her mind dancing with silent pleas.  “I hope he’s on this island, because I’ll need his support on this mission.”

            “He is,” Snow said firmly.  Her blood hummed and her insides turned molten.  He was willing to risk his life to give her the best chance at protecting her own and getting a strong enough force north to protect his.  _Was there anything sexier than a man who could look death in the eye and say, “I’ll defeat you because I must?”_ For the first time, it occurred to her that this was a man she could grow to love.

            A wave of worry and confusion swept through the room and Davos sputtered, “Your Grace…you can’t.  Only one of Valyrian blood can ride a dragon and your people need you in the north.  We should send the Targaryen fleet north with whatever men we can carry.”

            “Whatever men we can carry won’t be enough,” Snow responded roughly, his northern accent coming out heavier with stress.  “We need Queen Daenerys’s strength of numbers to man the Wall and prepare for its potential fall and we need to get as much dragonglass off the island as possible.  We have to buy time for the White Harbor fleet to get here.”

            “Then it’s settled,” Dany said, her voice as crisp as the salt-scented air.  Drogon screeched somewhere behind her and she looked around the room at her councilors.  “We all have much to do and little time to do it.  Let us get to work.”  She held Snow’s gaze and took a breath before answering with a challenging smile.  “Come, King Jon.  Let us see what happens when a northerner tries to ride a dragon.”


	6. Dragonriders

            What in Seven Hells was he thinking?

            _A thousand things at once.  That’s why I’m doing stupid things like petting a dragon and trying to get it used to my scent._

            Daenerys was watching closely as she finished rebraiding her hair into one plait that reached her lower back.  She looked like one of her Dothraki like that, though none of them had hair so long.  He met Viserion’s golden eyes and the dragon purred contentedly and rubbed his golden head spikes against Jon’s shoulder.  The gesture couldn’t help but wrench a smile from him and he petted all around Viserion’s head fondly.  Daenerys had told him Viserion was named for her brother, the one who had sold her to Khal Drogo.  Jon thought Viserys sounded like a prick, but Viserion didn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body, at least not that Jon had seen as of yet.  Viserion had helped Danaerys burn the Masters’ ships, though.  There was a fierceness inside him that could be loosed at a moment’s notice.

            Daenerys tied off her braid and let it go to catch the wind.  “Either the King in the North does have some Valyrian blood or a thousand tales about dragons are false.  He adores you.”

            Jon smiled and rubbed the top of Viserion’s snout.  The white dragon purred and released a cloud of steam through his nostrils.  “I wouldn’t know.  My father never told me who she was, but he must have loved her dearly.  He couldn’t bear to mention her.”

            “Was he ever in Essos?”

            He shook his head and watched Rhaegal and Drogon pace and stamp their feet as if demanding attention from Daenerys.  They eyed Viserion out of the corners of their eyes and Drogon grumbled testily until Daenerys approached to stroke his neck.  “He never left Westeros.  He brought me home to Winterfell with him at the end of Robert’s Rebellion.”  Daenerys frowned deeply and he regretted mentioning Robert Baratheon, even in an indirect way.  He swallowed hard and looked to Viserion again.  “You should know, it made him sick what they did to your family.  It was his sister who Rhaegar kidnapped, his sister whose body he brought home to bury, but when he saw the Lannisters lay your niece and nephew at Robert’s feet he couldn’t get north fast enough.”

            Daenerys nodded stiffly, her eyes locked on Rhaegal, who was nudging her with his nose.  “Thank you for telling me that.”

            He took a deep breath and forced himself to focus on one thing at a time.  He had to figure out how to get on Viserion’s back and not be burned or thrown off.  That was all that mattered right now.  “Alright,” he said, hoping his nerves didn’t show in his voice.  “How do I do this?”

            “Viserion has never been ridden, only Drogon,” Daenerys said.  “It will be a learning experience for him as much as for you.  What’s important is that you maintain your confidence and keep your mind open.”

            “What do you mean ‘keep my mind open’?” Jon asked.  Ghost was watching from a few yards away, clearly jealous of Viserion.

            Daenerys followed his gaze to Ghost and smiled.  “I expect it’s not so different from your bond with Ghost.  Open up your mind.  Listen for his thoughts and feelings and let him into yours as well.  It’s not easy…like peeling back your skin so he can see inside you.”

            He thought of the dozens, no, hundreds, of nights he had crept through the snow in Ghost’s body, tracking scents with him, bringing down game with him, exploring Castle Black with him.  He had a feeling a dragon might be far less receptive to warg-like intrusions, but at least he had something to go off of as far as to what he was trying to do here.  He shut his eyes and opened his mind.  There was Ghost, like a beacon just to his left.  _Jealousy, hunger, hunting tonight, dragons, Jon, jealous, hunting tonight…._   Then, there was a flicker, a tiny flame.  Viserion shifted, pulling his head out of Jon’s hands to look at him, but Jon kept his hands extended and his eyes shut.  Viserion sniffed at him and that flicker whispered to him.  _Jon, family, lonely, fly?, does he fly like Mhysa?, Jon and Mhysa, family, who will ride Rhaegal?, why does he want me and not Rhaegal?, if he is so smart and brave, why does Mhysa share him?, why does Mhysa not give him to Rhaegal who is the better flier?, so lonely, Jon, family, lonely…._

            His eyes snapped open and he felt air rushing in and out of his lungs like he was rising out of an icy lake.  He staggered and fell shoulder-first into Viserion’s side.  He heard Daenerys’s steps approaching, but she stopped when Viserion circled his tail around them and nudged Jon’s shoulder with his head, just like Ghost did.  Jon met the dragon’s gaze with wide eyes and saw concern there, not anger or pride.  _Jon, family, so lonely, does he fly?, does he like me?, will Mhysa keep this one?, will Mhysa share him?...._

            All outside thoughts left Jon’s head and his eyes stayed locked with Viserion’s as he clutched the dragon’s shoulder spikes and used them to carefully climb up the dragon’s shoulder to his back.  The dragon watched him intently the whole time and shifted slightly from one foot to the other as if to make sure that Jon was secure.  Then, neither of them paying any mind to Daenerys or the other dragons, Viserion and Jon turned their gazes forward to the cliff’s edge.  He could feel the dragon’s warmth already seeping through his heavy clothes, awakening his muscles and strengthening his bones.  Viserion shook out his shoulders as if adjusting to Jon’s weight, then took a step forward.  Then another, and another.  The cliff’s edge rushed forward to greet them and then…

            Cold, salty air in his face, in his hair, whipping his cloak behind him.  The sea rushed up to meet them, then the dragon adjusted his wings and all Jon’s sank into his gut, then rose again as they swooped upward.  The white-capped sea was not so dark from up here.  It was an icy blue flecked with white and gold shine.  The wind was biting but the sun was baking hot and the two sensations married to make this the easiest air to breathe he’d ever tasted.  The sky rushed by all around them and he could feel triumph rippling through Viserion’s nerve endings, could feel how satisfying it was to pump his wings and carry something more than himself, just as it made Jon feel so powerful to use his legs and his core to hang on and keep his balance as Viserion swooped left to cruise around Dragonstone.  The island and the castle looked small from up here and not so imposing.  He could see the dragonlike shape of the castle, the Dothraki horde spread out on the plains, the narrow beaches bordering the island in six places where the sea had retreated from the cliffs.  Viserion glowed with pride and took them higher into the air, then circled downward so they could feel the wind rush around their arms and wings.  A grin stretched unbidden across Jon’s fate and he thought that this was what true freedom felt like.  A howl of laughter bubbled up inside him and he let it out in the same moment that Viserion screeched his own joy and pride.  They pulled up and swooped out towards the deepening sea as the sound of great wings echoed around them.  Jon looked to each side and found Rhaegal grinning on their left and to their right a proud Drogon and Daenerys on his back, her silver hair whipping behind her as she laughed, her face open and warm and entirely unguarded, just watching them with enough pride and love to make her glow.

            _Love?_   Yes, definitely love.  Surely just for Viserion, though?  They hardly knew each other.

            _Jon is Mhysa’s,_ his mind whispered to him.  _And Mhysa is Jon’s and Jon is Viserion’s and Viserion is Jon’s and Viserion and Rhaegal and Drogon are Mhysa’s._

            Warmth expanded in his chest and he realized as he stroked Viserion’s shoulder and stared right back at Daenerys as she stared at him that this would be his family.  Daenerys would be his wife and the dragons his children too, not just hers.  Viserion would be his as Ghost was his and they would fly together like this until the sun set far away to the west and the stars lit the sky and then they would reach for the stars together.

            Daenerys’s laugh softened into a warm smile, her violet eyes shining and molten, her cheeks soft and pink.  As he stared back at her, smiling in just the same way he thought, it occurred to him that he could so easily love this woman, that he might already love this woman.

            Daenerys’s smile widened just a bit and she called to him, “Let’s see what you can do, King of the North.  Let’s go fishing!”

            Drogon banked hard to the right and fell towards the sea.  Viserion and Rhaegal banked with him, making Jon slip slightly and tighten his grip on Viserion’s spikes.  _Fishing, we are fishing, will there be dolphins?, dolphins are so fun to fish, will there be little fish to chase?, has Jon ever fished before?, does Jon like Viserion?, is he impressed?...._

            Jon grinned and that warmth expanded in him again as he carefully rubbed Viserion’s neck, keeping a firm grip with his other hand.  _Yes, I like you and I am impressed.  You are gorgeous and strong and incredible._

            Viserion seemed to glow hotter and he let out a joyful screech that made Jon grin so hard it hurt. 

            Jon managed to hang on as Viserion joined his brothers in swooping down to the waves and plunging his head underwater to seize fish.  Drogon captured a small dolphin in his claws and tossed it squealing into the air.  Viserion and Rhaegal launched towards it and as Jon grimaced and held on tight, laughing, the dragons ripped the dolphin apart.  Drogon ended up with the smallest piece and seemed ornery as he tossed it, roasted it in mid-air, then caught it to eat it.  Viserion did the same with his meat and Jon had to use every muscle in his body, but he kept his position.  When Viserion level himself out and chewed his dolphin, Jon managed to look over and found Daenerys smiling and watching him with something like pride.  “We might make a Targaryen of you yet, Jon Snow,” she called to him.

            He couldn’t help the grin that lit his face.  There were no politics out here, no ears at every door, no Night King, no Lannisters.  It was just him, Daenerys, and the dragons.  “Is that what I’ll be when I marry you?  A Targaryen?”

            Daenerys shrugged.  “If you like.  I have no intention of letting go of my name.  You’re welcome to keep your own or I could legitimize you and make you a Stark if that’s what you want.”

            _A Stark._   It was what he had always dreamed of, being his father’s son, a Stark, not just the bastard of Winterfell.  His chest felt tight and his eyes burned.  When he spoke, his throat felt like he’d swallowed a mouthful of sand and he felt himself smile completely unbidden.  “All I ever wanted was to be a Stark.”

            Daenerys glowed as warm as Drogon beneath her.  He thought she might have wanted him to take her name or keep his own.  Naming him a Stark made them more equal in a traditional sense.  But no, she was happy to offer this to him, the thing he’d prayed to the Old Gods for every night.  _Make me a Stark.  Not a Snow, not a bastard, a Stark._   “Then a Stark you shall be.  We’ll do it when we reach Winterfell so your sister and your lords can be there when the King in the North becomes a Stark by name as well as by blood.”

            There were no words for what he felt.  For a long time, they just looked at each other, lost in their thoughts.  Then, Daenerys led them back to Dragonstone, where Ghost waited silent and impatient on the cliffs.

            Ghost stuck to his side like glue that whole evening, laying across his feet as he penned scrolls destined for Winterfell, Oldtown, Eastwatch, Castle Black, and White Harbor.  There was so much he had to tell Sansa that a hundred raven scrolls would not suffice, so he had to entrust that Sansa knew him well enough to trust him and to devise his deeper feelings that he didn’t have the space to write down.  _Daenerys has pledged forty thousand men and all the dragonglass we could ask for.  Daenerys will lead her dragons on raids north of the Wall and I’ll be with her, riding one of the dragons.  Daenerys has pledged to legitimize me when we arrive at Winterfell.  Daenerys and I are to be married when the war is done to solidify our alliance against Cersei._   There were a thousand things he wanted to ask her too.  _Is Littlefinger still there?  The Knights of the Vale?  Have there been any problems with the Wildlings moving into Eastwatch?  Are the lords of the North still behind me?  Are you still behind me?_

            He needed to get home.  He needed to get to Winterfell, but he couldn’t leave without knowing for certain that the Targaryen forces could and would follow him.  He had to help Daenerys lead the dragons in battle and use them to send the Ironborn either to the grave or to the Iron Islands. 

            He wondered briefly if Daenerys would allow Viserion to take him back to Winterfell or if she and all three dragons would come north with him.  It was a lot to ask of her, handicapping her with one less dragon or no councilors or sworn swords.  He thought that flying home to Winterfell would be so much quicker than sailing and then traveling by horse, though.  He couldn’t picture Daenerys sleeping on hard ground beneath the stars, but he’d underestimated her several times already and she had spent something like a year with the Dothraki, traveling by horse and making camp under the stars.  Maybe a flight over the wilderness would not be such a trial for her, but he would be a fool to suggest she leave her councilors and protectors behind to travel alone with him.

            Ghost continued to cling to him as he dressed for dinner in his black doublet, steel gorget, and Stark-grey cloak.  When Sansa had given him the black doublet, he had cringed and said as gently as he could that he wasn’t a man of the Night’s Watch anymore.  To this, Sansa had raised an eyebrow and said, “No, but black was always your color.  There’s a grey cloak to go with it.  We burned that damned black cloak of yours for a reason.”

            He fastened the cloak, combed his hair back with his fingers and tied it with a leather thong, then followed Ghost from their chambers and towards the dining hall.  He sat between Davos and Rahkarro, who, in broken Common Tongue, admired Ghost and asked questions about him.  Daenerys was right about the Dothraki.  The more Jon talked with Rahkarro and Aggo about Ghost, the more they seemed to open up to him and welcome him, even respect him.  Ghost, as if he understood Rahkarro, sat with his chin up and a regal set to his shoulders.  _No wings, but I am by Jon’s side, by his side always, my Jon, by my side, good boy, no wings, by his side…._

            Daenerys sat at the head of the table with Tyrion to one side and Missandei to the other.  The three of them spent most of dinner in close conversation, Jon feared due entirely to him.  Daenerys had promised him so much in return for so little he was quite sure at any moment someone would pull out the rug from under him and send him falling.  He tried not to look at them, wanting to avoid being perceived as being attracted to Daenerys, which he undoubtedly was, or perceived as trying to listen in, which he undoubtedly was trying not to do.  It didn’t help that Daenerys had dressed the part of an exotic queen tonight.  She wore a Targaryen-red gown of wispy silks that crossed over her chest to cover her breasts and little else, then swooped around her hips to pool in a flowing skirt.  Silver armbands made to look like dragons in flight grasped her biceps and her hair was mostly loose down her back with a braid swirling around it, an effect, it seemed to Jon, meant to cause the eye to travel down her hair to her completely bare back.  Gods, her skin looked so soft and smooth and despite the chill of the stone castle, there was a flush on her cheeks and neck that told him how warm she would be.  Hot-blooded, just like her dragons.

            It would be so easy to get her out of that dress.  So easy Jon’s mind was playing a thousand different scenarios across his retinas of how he could get it off.  It looked easy enough to unravel or lift over her head.  It looked easy to tear too; he could see every curve of her body through the thin fabric.  Gods, he wanted it off of her, wanted her lying naked underneath him, looking up at him with that smile like a challenge she’d worn today.  _Let’s see what happens when a northerner tries to ride a dragon._

            Seven Hells.  Jon blinked hard and rubbed his head to scrub the image from his mind.  Not okay.  Not at dinner with all these men pledged to kill for her sitting around him.  “Your Grace?” Davos asked warily.

            “A headache,” he answered.  “Nothing more.”

            Davos snorted and pretended to focus on cutting his meat as he said, “Yeah, I’ve got one too and it gets worse every time I look down to the end of the table.”

            Jon gritted his teeth and shook his head in frustration.  It wouldn’t be long before she’d be his wife and then he could ogle her all he pleased, but until then every look he gave her was a sign of weakness to everyone who noted it.  Tyrion, Missandei, Greyworm…they all seemed like they’d be ready to pounce at him the first time he showed weakness.  He’d asked too much of their beloved queen, asked that she move her own ambitions to the back burner and risk her life and her dragons, and they were too loyal not to resent him for it.

            When dinner concluded, Jon was the first to excuse himself, his head spinning as he escaped the dining hall and marched with Ghost at his heels to the nearest room with a balcony.  He found a sitting room within minutes and slipped onto the balcony, letting the icy night air whip at his face and neck.  He shut his eyes and saw the view north from the Wall, the Haunted Forest stretched out below, the ice cliffs and mountains in the distance, the glimmering white snow all around.  There were many things that he would not miss, but he would certainly miss having the Wall to go to to clear his head.  It was the best place in the world for that.

            Ghost jerked his head around and a moment later, Jon heard the door to the sitting room, which he’d left just barely ajar, swing open on creaking hinges.  He took in a deep breath to steel himself and could just barely taste the rich and complicated eastern spices in the room.  “My queen,” he said softly.

            “My king,” she answered, surprising him.  It was the first time she had so blatantly addressed him as an equal.  “You left dinner in a hurry.”

            He shook his head in disbelief at the day’s events.  Daenerys had pledged her forces to the North.  He’d found dragonglass and showed it to Daenerys.  The Greyjoys had gone up in smoke.  He’d pledged himself as a dragonrider.  He’d ridden a dragon.  And now Daenerys, the most powerful woman in the world, was addressing him as _my king_.  “You must be cold in that dress.”

            “Only a bit,” she said.  “I expect that after the next week it may be a very long time before I wear any of my Essosi gowns again and I plan to enjoy them while I can.”

            He took a deep breath and opened his eyes, then turned to face her.  She had shut the door behind her, it was just them and Ghost, and it was all he could do to keep his eyes on her face and nowhere else.  “It suits you.  Sansa has a taste for fashion too, I expect you’ll get on well.”

            Daenerys raised an eyebrow and in a split second her eyes flicked down him and then back up to his face.  Had she just checked him out?  “I hope so.  You’re not airsick, are you?  Viserion and I did push you a bit.”

            Jon shook his head right away, his blood flaring with the need to dispel that notion.  “No.  I’m glad you pushed me.  It felt…good.  Unreal.”

            Daenerys smiled and her eyes sparked in the dark room.  “Good.”

            The thought of flying beside her, of being able to breathe so free for the first time in his life, the way she looked smiling and laughing with him, the sun glinting off her violet eyes and silver hair, that thought warmed his blood and sent it beating through his stiffened muscles again and he couldn’t keep his eyes on her face any longer.  When he met her eyes again there was the tiniest flicker of a smirk at her lips.  His heart skipped a beat and crushed his chest for a moment.  She’d dressed this way on purpose to get a reaction out of him.  She was used to using her looks to manipulate men and he had been holding his own against her up to this point.  “Your Grace, are you playing games with me?”

            Daenerys’s smile widened just a bit and she folded her hands in front of her.  “I was very young when I realized I was a part of a great game, a game of thrones.  When I got a little older, I realized that there was a great wheel that turned with this game and that if I didn’t learn to play, I’d be crushed beneath it, just like my people had been crushed year after year under the boots of masters, of powerful families, of khals.  I am always playing games, King Jon, because the moment I stop playing is the moment the wheel turns over my bones.”

            Her words disturbed him deeply and he frowned at the thought of a thirteen-year-old Daenerys thrown to a horselord as a pawn and emerging with three dragons and ambitions to never be a pawn again.  He took a step towards her and it occurred to him that they were the same age and that if there was a wheel, it had certainly rolled over both of them and left them just alive enough to keep going.  “You don’t have to play games with me.  It must feel like I’m using you, like I’m getting much more out of this alliance than you, but if I had something more to give you that wouldn’t put my people at risk, I would.  Say the word and you’ll have it.”

            Daenerys’s eyebrows rose and the smirk washed away, replaced by uncertainty.  “Anything?”

            He nodded, seeing her suddenly as a young woman who’d been hurt too many times, who had put herself in a position that required her to be made of stone at all times.  He took another step closer so he could taste her perfume in the air.  It made him feel drunk and dizzy.  “Say the word.”

            For a moment, Daenerys just stared at him, caught off-guard.  She blinked, the only reliable indicator he’d found of what she was thinking and that she was thinking she was out of her element.  She held his gaze, though, and after a heavy moment, she said in that cool voice, “Leave your chamber door unlocked tonight, Jon Snow.”

            With nothing more, she turned on her heel and left the sitting room, leaving him barely breathing and his head spinning.  _What in the hells have I just done?_


	7. What Kind of Relationship This Will Be

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So this ended up more fluffy than smutty, but I think satisfying. I hope you enjoy it!

            Dany had bathed before dinner to wash away the sweat from exploring the cave and riding Drogon for most of the day, but she couldn’t resist running a cloth from the hot water basin over her skin and reapplying her oils just to soothe her mind.  It helped, certainly, as did Missandei’s silent combing of her hair, but her thoughts still raced.

            It was as if in the course of twenty-four hours the entire world had turned upside-down.  Yesterday, she and Tyrion had been quietly going over final strategies for the meeting with the supposed King in the North as they breakfasted.  But Jon Snow had not bowed, Cersei was not the true enemy, her allies were dead or otherwise out of reach, she was going to marry Snow after she and her dragons melted these ice men, she was going to legitimize him at a cost to her own authority, and now….

            _Seven Hells, Dany…._

            It didn’t feel like it had with Daario.  That she had at least thought she understood.  The way she felt about Jon Snow was liquid and complex, slipping through her fingers and curling back around them the moment she thought she had them pinned down.  In retrospect, she recognized that when he’d stood up to her attempt at manipulating him in the throne room it had been both intriguing and enticing.  She’d never stood toe-to-toe with a man she could not figure out how to manipulate.

            She had figured it out tonight, but in doing so had sealed her fate.  The way to manipulate Jon Snow was to tell him his people needed him.

            And now, gods damn it all, she loved him for it.

            Dany was not vain.  She’d spent too long under the thumb of men who saw her as a cunt with legs to be vain.  But she knew what advantages she had and how to press them and one of those advantages was being able to quickly get inside people’s heads and find out how to manipulate them before they got the better of her.  Today she had seen inside Jon Snow’s head and it was alarmingly new.  There was no arrogance, not even much pride in himself, though he would likely kill anyone who slandered his family or his home.  He wasn’t a liar, in fact he’d shown himself to be someone who refused to play games and would only work with someone willing to be as honest as him.  He was a risk-taker, a trait she’d at least already known she found alluring, but moreover was selfless and took risks for selfless reasons.  He had only met her dragons once and yet today he had climbed atop Viserion and not made a sound as they leapt off the cliffside because he believed his ability to ride Viserion would ensure the Targaryen forces made it north faster.  Not only that, but he’d bonded with Viserion, brought joy to her quiet, gentle dragon that she had never seen in him, joy that she herself had never really known.  And after giving her that, he had sheepishly said that he would give her anything she wanted that wouldn’t bring harm to his people.

            Loyalty wasn’t enough anymore.  She needed to know if she was in love with her betrothed and if he could ever love her back.

            Dany dressed in her silk robe, the one of shimmering red that approached black in darkness and dragged behind her in a short train.  She tied it loosely so her cleavage was bared all the way to the base of her sternum and tugged her hair loose to fall in waves to her waist.  “Your Grace?” Missandei asked softly.  “Who are you dressing for?”

            Dany’s mouth tightened more in nervousness than anything else.  “For the King in the North, of course.  I have a matter of strategic importance to settle with him.”

            Missandei had sided with Tyrion against Dany and argued with her heartily over the matter of Jon Snow’s place in their overall strategy.  The idea of committing to a marriage so early in the game and of worse legitimizing him beforehand was a political move both her most trusted councilors thought foolish and unwise.  The girl looked down at her hands and, with worry straining her voice, said, “Your Grace, I worry that such a meeting would be strategically harmful.  To become emotionally involved with Lord Snow at this stage…”

            “Would set my mind at ease,” Dany finished, gently cutting her friend off.  “I suspect there could be more to this than a political alliance or lust or making the best of being thrown together.  And if it is something more, or isn’t, I cannot move forward without knowing which.  Either answer will make it quite simple.”

            “But…Your Grace…the risk of emotional pain either way could make it far from simple.”

            Dany met Missandei’s eyes with a sad smile and said quietly, “My dearest friend, you know better than anyone that I have little reason to fear emotional pain anymore.  If that is what this scheme will end in, so be it, just as long as I can see where I am going.”

            Missandei’s dark eyes shimmered with unshed tears and she stepped forward to wrap Dany in a fierce hug that she returned.  “I only want happiness for you, Your Grace.  If you think there is a chance for that, then I wish you the best fortune.”

            Dany shut her eyes tight to help swallow her fear and loneliness, then released her friend.

            The halls of Dragonstone were cold and empty as she traversed them.  Her silk robe offered little reprieve from the chill, but she took only a fleeting moment’s notice of it.  Her mind was overflowing with images, images of Jon Snow, picking apart the tiniest of details in an attempt to determine what was in his head.  The way his eyes turned dark and molten in the cave when they stood so close together and he told her she was an easy person to believe in.  The way his eyes crinkled at the corners as he stroked her beloved Viserion and as they flew together, laughing and smiling.  The way he had softened as he kissed her hand and called her his queen. 

            She hesitated, but chose not to knock, instead turning the door handle without warning.  It was her castle, after all.  His door was unlocked despite the hour, as she’d instructed him to leave it, and the door opened before her with a soft _creak_.  The room was dark, but warmed by golden light from a roaring fire.  Ghost was stretched out on the rushes in front of the fireplace and looked up at her with a wolfish grin.  As she closed the door behind her, she met Jon’s eyes on hers.  Instead of the stunning black and grey ensemble he’d worn to dinner, he was dressed in his boots, trousers, and a black leather jerkin with the laces loose at the neck.  He looked quite comfortable and sexy enough to send her blood pulsing warm through her veins again.  In his hand was a large horn that he brought to his lips and tipped back without breaking her gaze.  He wiped his lips with the back of his hand as he set down the horn and her eyes took in a scar from a burn on his palm.  His jaw was made of stone, but his eyes were dark and molten and he held her gaze in feigned fearlessness. 

Jon stood and moved to the sideboard to pour a glass of wine and silently offer it to her.  She accepted it with a soft thanks, then moved closer to the fire to watch as he poured from a tankard into his horn.  “Do northmen not drink wine?” she asked in what she hoped sounded like gentle sarcasm.

            Jon took a large drink from the horn, then looked into it as he answered, “Not so often and I never got a taste for it.  I prefer ale.”

            Her hands were shaking.  What in Seven Hells was wrong with her?  She took a page from Jon’s book and drank a long sip of wine, then took a seat in the chair beside his.  Ghost picked up his head and nudged her knee with his nose.  A shot of warmth ran up from the spot to her spine and she couldn’t help the smile that formed at her lips or the way she held Ghost’s red eyes as she rubbed one large ear with her free hand.  Jon watched her like a hawk from where he stood on the other side of his chair until she finally said, “You seem to think you know why I am here.”

            He took another sip of ale, then answered, “There was a woman once who used to tell me that I knew nothing.  Now the only thing I know I know is that I know nothing and then I’m never really wrong.  I don’t know your mind, my queen.  I think you want me to think you’re here to…demand…sexual favors.”

            She couldn’t help staring at him as he answered, watching the way his brow creased as he thought of that woman, the way his jaw ticked on “sexual favors.”  She had put him in a horribly uncomfortable position and he’d let her.  Dany swallowed hard and thought over her response carefully as Jon squirmed, then said, “I’ve made all my demands of you, Jon Snow.”

            Jon met her eyes then with a wry half-smile.  “This is the part where I’m meant to fall on my knees and tell you I’d be happy to give you what you ask, no demands needed.”

            She raised an eyebrow.  “If you were most any other man, yes.  But I’m here because you’re not most other men.”

            That caught him off-guard.  For a moment, they both stared at each other as if trying not to show weakness while they determined whether their masks were still intact.  Finally, Jon said roughly, “I told you I don’t play games.  And unless someone followed you here, there’s no one anywhere close to hear us.”

            Dany blinked, then drank the remainder of her wine and set down the glass.  “I don’t sleep with men to manipulate them, Jon Snow.  Not since I did it to convince my husband to love me and stop abusing me.  I let them think I do to manipulate them into thinking the next one could be them.  But you don’t want me that way, do you?”

            Jon narrowed his eyes and finished his ale, then set aside the horn to lean against the back of his chair with both hands.  “You’re still playing games with me.”

            “And you’re still not playing.”

            Jon shut his eyes and shook his head, smiling wearily.  “Gods help me.  No, I’m not, and I am relieved that it hasn’t gotten me killed yet.”

            She let a crooked smile loose and stood slowly, letting her robe slip open at her knee, then fall back into place when she reached a stand.  Jon didn’t miss it and when he met her eyes again, he looked far less nervous and less controlled.  Dany picked up her goblet and moved slowly around the room to the sideboard to refill it herself.  “You are far too interesting to kill, Jon Snow, far too important.”

            “Does this amuse you?” Jon asked, his eyes boring into her back as she poured the wine.  “You like that I don’t play your games?”

            She turned to face him and took a sip of her wine before answering, “Yes.”

            He turned to her head-on so they were less than arm’s length apart.  Her nerve-endings began to tingle with sparks.  “What do you want from me, Daenerys?

The way her name sounded on his tongue, caressed by his rough northern accent…it made her blood simmer under her skin.  _I want children.  I want a man’s love.  I want my kingdom.  I want my people safe and happy.  I want my dragons free and beloved.  I want to be loved for who I am, not what I am._ “I want to know if you want to marry me, Jon Snow.  Not whether you need to, but whether you want to.”

Jon’s eyes moved to her lips and he sighed before answering softly, “I do want to.”

“Why?”

“Because of who you are.”  He met her gaze then and his eyes were like the inside of that cave, all glimmering darkness that reached inward deeper and deeper.  “You love your people more than anything and would die for them without question if need be.  You’re strong, as strong as stone.  And passionate…as full of fire as your children.  You’re brilliant and stunning and I’d be a fool not to see it.  Even with everything else in my head I can’t not see it.  And…Daenerys…” he looked down at his clasped hands, his brow creased with painful memories.  “I thought I would never fit in anywhere, that I could never have a family of my own.  I joined the Night’s Watch without seeing it as much of a sacrifice because I knew what it was to grow up a Snow, to always be on the outside looking in, and I didn’t want to bring any more Snows into the world.”  His accent had grown heavier with emotion and when he met her gaze again the intensity in his eyes took her breath away.  “But what I felt today in the sky with you and Viserion and Rhaegal and Drogon…that felt like coming home, like having a real home that was mine for the first time.  Viserion sees the five of us as a family and I never dreamed I could have anything like that and I can’t let that go now.”

Her stomach began to churn and her organs slowly sank into her gut.  “Jon,” she murmured softly, her throat closing off at the words she had to say.  “The dragons are the only children I’ll ever have.  I lost my son and I’ll never have another.  This is the largest my family will ever be.”

Jon frowned deeply.  “Who told you that?”

“The witch who murdered my husband.”

Jon shook his head as if out of disdain for Mirri Maz Dur.  “Have you considered that she might not be a reliable source of information?”

The tiniest smile escaped her, but her eyes were burning with unshed tears.  “It hasn’t been so long since I was with a man, Jon Snow, and here I stand, barren.  _When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves._ That is when I will have children again.”

He shook his head again, slower and sadder this time, then reached out to take her face between his hands.  The gesture made her muscles twitch, but she let him do it and the warmth of his rough hands on her face was enough to send her eyes drooping shut.  “You have three children.  And there is no way to know the truth of this for certain…the word of a murderous witch is the last thing I’d take for evidence.”  Her heart began to race with something bubbling and warm, something foreign that it took her several moments to recognize as hope.  She opened her eyes and found Jon staring at her, his lips parted and his eyes studying her face, the creases in his brow washed away.  “So yes, Daenerys Stormborn, I do want to marry you.”

            She laid her hand over his on her left cheek, then set down her wine goblet.  “There’s something else I want to know, and you’ll need to do something for me if you want to answer it.”  Jon’s eyes wandering from her face down her neck to her chest and the rise of her breasts just barely exposed by her loose robe.  Her heart skipped a beat in her chest beat louder at the attention.  “No games.”

            His eyes met hers, sparkling with desire and longing.  “What do you want to know?” he asked roughly.

            She licked her lips, watching his eyes follow her tongue, then answered in a whisper, “I want to know what sort of relationship this will be, and I imagine you’re wondering that too.”

            A crooked smile played across his lips, making him almost unrecognizable.  He was normally so grim.  “I expect it won’t be a purely strategic one.”

            “No, it won’t.”

            Jon’s left hand moved down her face, the pad of his thumb tracing a line from her chin along her jaw to her throat and down to her collarbone.  Sparks followed his touch, completely unlike Drogo or Daario, and her eyelids drooped in response.  He sighed wearily, then extended his fingers to comb them through her hair.  “What did I do to qualify for this test?” he asked hoarsely.

            She watched his face carefully, taking in every flicker of lust, tenderness, confusion, nervousness, and so much more.  His fingertips grazed her upper ribs and it was all she could do to keep her eyes open.  “You didn’t play games with me and I was glad.  I like who you are, no mask involved.”

            Jon brought his hand back up to her throat and the barely-there brush of his fingertips caused her neck to curve back and her eyes to fall shut.  “You think you know me so well.”

            Dany forced her eyes open to meet his gaze and whispered, “I know the woman you loved was the Wildling you climbed the Wall with.  I know you’ve given your life to protecting people who gave you so little in return and you did it anyway.  I know you’re a very dangerous man who couldn’t enjoy killing less.  I know your world has been as lonely as mine.  Am I close?”

            A deep crease returned to his brow and he stared down at his fingers combing through a lock of her hair that he’d pulled forward over her shoulder.  “Aye.  I suppose I’ll never be able to lie to you if you got that from a day of watching me.”

            She took his hand in hers and when his eyes met her gaze, she said, “You wouldn’t have tried anyway, you’re too honest.  You’re Ned Stark’s son to the bone, aren’t you?”

            One corner of his mouth curved up just barely and she studied his hand in hers, then kissed a scar on the back of it.  His eyes were only for her, entranced.  “I try to be.” 

            She found another small scar along his ring finger and kissed that one too, holding his gaze.  “Do you know who I am, Jon Stark?”

            His whole body seemed to twitch at the name and his eyes went as dark as obsidian.  “I know you respect people who came from nothing, maybe more than people who came from something.  I know you believe in freedom and in protecting it at all costs.  I know you have a side of you that’s a dragon protecting her children or dispensing justice.  And I know you’re lonely.  I know exactly what that feels like and it makes me sick seeing it on you.”

            The answer took her breath away.  Jon, watching her expression, frowned, then reached out to caress her temple.  “Is that what tonight is about?  You want to know if you’ll still be lonely with me?”

            The words made her feel naked, all her clothes, even her skin burned away by them to reveal an in-over-her-head, lonely, nervous girl.  No mother of dragons, just Dany, as she was when she was a child terrified of her brother, wanting only to stop running, to stop being afraid, to go back to the house with the red door, the only place she had ever been happy.  She wrenched her gaze from his and took a step back, but Jon grabbed her by the elbow to stop her and then slipped one arm around her waist.  His expression had softened and he gently slid his hand down her arm to her wrist at her chest.  They had gotten much closer together in the process of him stopping her retreat and when he intertwined their fingers it put the back of his hand to her heart and the back of hers to his.  Even through his jerkin, she could feel the warmth of him and the way his heart was racing.  “Don’t go anywhere,” he whispered, his rough accent made deeper by the change in volume.  “I want to know the same thing.  Sometimes, I’d lay next to…Ygritte…and I could’ve been alone under the stars, just me and my family’s ghosts.  I loved her, but I want to believe there’s something more than that.”

            She thought of all those nights in Meereen with Daario, of lying next to him and thinking that if she couldn’t hear him breathing it would be no different from sleeping alone, perhaps even lonelier.  She swallowed hard and met his eyes inches from hers.  “Then let’s find out.”

            He only hesitated for a moment, then his lips were on hers and her eyes fell shut as she drank in the gentle warmth of his kiss, the pressure of their lips together, the soft bristles of his beard on her chin.  It took the breath right out of her, turned everything around them to fog and warmth and nothing more.  There was no Dragonstone around them, no councilors down the hall, no Painted Table, nothing but them.  Before she knew it, she was kissing him back, their lips brushing together so soft and slow, then harder as she gasped for air.  Jon’s hand in hers moved to cradle her jaw and tip it back to kiss her deeper, their lips parting to taste each other.  He smelled of pine and leather and tasted of ale, all man and all northerner.  His tongue tangled in hers and the breath fell stagnant in her lungs as she got wrapped up in it.  Her legs turned watery and she left the soft leather of his jerkin under her fingers as she gripped his shoulder.  He was all muscle, his shoulders firm and powerful from a life spent wielding a sword.  Her fingers scrambled to the ties of his jerkin and tugged them loose so she could slip one hand inside it to feel those muscles under her skin.  His skin was so smooth, the muscles rock-hard underneath it, and he was flushed with warmth, with wanting her.  His mouth caught her lower lip and sucked on it and she couldn’t contain the tiny moan that escaped her throat.  His fingers dug into her lower back and tangled in her hair, then he spun them around to seat her on the edge of the bed and lean over her to keep kissing her as she yanked at the ties of his jerkin.  The kiss slowed and Jon pressed one last kiss to her mouth before he pulled away.  His eyes were molten grey-black as he stared down at her and began to peel away his jerkin.  She noticed his hands shaking and her heart stopped in her chest when he pulled the jerkin up over his head.  _Oh gods…._

            There were scars from terrible stab wounds across his chest, half a dozen of them, each as grotesque as the next.  They were all half-healed, almost raw-looking, as if they could open back up and bleed his life away at any moment.  One over his heart was especially jagged and this was the one she laid shaking fingertips on as she stared in shock.  Each scar looked like it could have been fatal, should have been fatal, and yet here he stood.  “Jon…” she mumbled in a choked whisper, “Who did this to you?”

            “My men,” he said, his voice low and hoarse with emotion.  “I tried to rescue the Wildlings from Hardhome before the dead could claim them.  I saved a few thousand, but tens of thousands more were lost.  When I brought the survivors south of the Wall to protect them, my brothers of the Night’s Watch…they were less than understanding.”

            Tears burned in her eyes as she felt the way his flesh parted at the site of the half-healed scar.  Nausea was creeping up into her throat and she remembered how it had felt as her people threw stones at her, hissing and screaming, how she had felt as the Sons of the Harpy overtook the fighting pit and killed her people around her.  “Your own men did this?  How did you survive?”

            Jon swallowed hard, his eyes fixed on her hand on his chest.  “I didn’t.”  She looked to him sharply, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.  Jon’s jaw ticked, his mouth set grimly and his eyes far away, back at Castle Black.  “They betrayed me and murdered me out in the snow.  I knew I was going to die when I didn’t even feel the fourth knife or the ones after. All I felt was cold.  By the time I fell all I could see was the blur of the snow around me.  I remember feeling Ghost’s name on my tongue, wanting to call for him.  Then, nothing.”

            She didn’t doubt him for a moment, only felt the gut-wrenching pain of those memories as she let herself see and feel them.  How could she doubt his words when the scars were right there before her?  How could she doubt him when she had stepped onto Drogo’s funeral pyre and watched and listened, unburnt, as her dragons hatched, had nursed them at her breasts without a single scar on her as the fire burned down to embers?  “How did you…come back?”

            He stiffened, perhaps in surprise at the way she’d accepted his words.  “There was a red priestess at Castle Black.  She’d come with Stannis and had returned to us when his army fell.  She brought me back…I don’t know how.  I just remember how cold the air felt when it first entered my lungs again, the way I choked on it.  And Ghost.  Ghost was by my side.”

            He had died and returned.  It seemed impossible, but yet how could it be?  Here he stood with the wounds to prove it, no games.

            She drew her hand back and slowly stood, slipping around him and crossing the room to the fireplace.  Ghost looked up at her anxiously and Jon asked quietly, “What are you doing?”

            “There’s something I should show you,” she answered, kneeling before the fireplace.  She pushed back the trailing sleeves of her robe and reached into the flames.  Ghost leapt to his feet, then stilled to watch her, just as Jon gasped.  She clasped a coal cracked with the orange glow of an ember and lifted it from the grate, then met Jon’s eyes as she crumbled it in her hand and returned it to the flames as ash.  Slowly, she stood and turned to face him head-on, his eyes wide with concern and shock, the firelight glinting off the scars on his chest.  “No games, right?  When Khal Drogo died, I stood on his funeral pyre beside his body and watched my dress burn away to nothing, listened as my dragon’s eggs cracked and split open the sky.  I held them and nursed them as the fire raged around us and when the fire had burned away to embers and ash, there I was, holding my children.  Fire cannot harm a dragon, and I am the last of them.”

            Jon met her at the foot of the bed as she approached and reached out to take her hand.  He winced as if her skin were still hot to the touch, then studied every inch of it for burns beneath the ash before he met her eyes again.  “The Unburnt.  No games, no masks.”

            “It’s just you and me, Jon,” she whispered.  “I don’t believe in gods, but somehow we were meant to survive when so many fell around us.  We have a part to play in all this.”

            His eyes had gone dark and stormy and he ran a hand through her hair as he said, “I don’t want to think about all that right now.  I only want to think about this woman I came back from the dead to find.”

            The words knocked the uncertainty out of her head, knocked the breath out of her lungs.  _I only want to think about this woman I came back from the dead to find._   Was that what she was?  Was this what she was meant for?  To be Jon’s lover and partner as they fought the Army of the Dead?  To sit the Iron Throne as he ruled by her side as King in the North?  It was a possibility she never could have dreamed of and yet it felt so real she could taste it on her tongue.  And, as she stared into those grey eyes, the eyes of a Stark, all loyalty and honesty, she agreed with him.  Whatever they were meant for, all she wanted to think of right now was this man she had defied the flames to find, this man who respected her and saw her as an equal and valued her for who she was, not just as the Mother of Dragons or as a woman, but as Dany.  Her eyes fell shut at the thought and how sweet it tasted on her tongue, and then she was kissing him, her fingers tangling in his inky-black curls at the back of his neck, her hand gripping his powerful shoulder as his arms wrapped around her.

            She realized that they’d found the bed when she wrapped her leg around his and felt not just the softness of leather against her bare skin, but also the pressure of his weight at her hips.  Her breath came lighter and faster and she dug her fingers into his back, pulling him down over her tighter so he enveloped her in warmth.  Jon groaned and moved to kiss her neck and chest.  When he slid aside her robe and kissed her breasts, her eyes rolled back in her head and she gasped, pleasure arcing along her nerve endings, making her tingle with want.  He flicked a nipple with his tongue, then drew it into his mouth and sucked in a way that she felt all the way down to her core, hot and wet and needy.  “Jon…” she gasped.

            Then, her robe was somehow untied and she lay naked beneath him as he brushed kisses all across her chest and belly, all the way down to her waist.  Her toes curled and her heels dug into his back as he left teasing barely-there kisses along her hips and thighs, and then his kiss was on her lower lips, his mouth brushing them and teasing her so she cried out.  “Jon!  Gods…”

            His hands were on her hips then, holding her to him as he kissed her right at her center, then slipped his tongue inside her to taste her.  It was unlike anything she’d ever felt, all pleasure and agony and soft warmth and gods, did she want him.  She wanted him deep inside her, wanted to come with him and scream his name.  But he didn’t stop, stroking _that spot_ inside her with his tongue until her hips bucked involuntarily and he had to hold her down as he tortured her.  He fastened his lips around her clit and sucked and she saw white as her eyes slammed shut, as her back arched and she screamed his name.  And then she came, crashing down as he kissed and licked and sucked at her until every muscle tingled with electricity.

            She was fighting to catch her breath when he slid back up her to kiss her lips.  She kissed him back drowsily, tasting herself on his tongue, and her toes curled again, wanting him inside her.  He’d shed his boots and his trousers, she could feel the blazing warmth of his skin as she wrapped her legs around him, could feel the hardness against her center that made her throb with desire for him.  He broke the kiss and she opened her eyes to find him staring down at her, his pupils blown wide with lust, his lips swollen and parted as he too gasped for breath.  Then he leaned down to kiss her again, hard and deep, and he was at her entrance, pushing inside her as her lips parted in a wide “O.”  Gods, it felt good to be split open, to feel him inside her, her walls clenched around him, pulling him in deeper, needing him.  When he was fully sheathed inside her, she felt his hand clench on her butt and hold her tight around him as they both gasped.  Then they were kissing again as he pumped in and out of her, drowning in one another.  There was the softness of the bed around them, the warmth of his skin on hers, the sweet pressure of him inside her and around her, the rightness of his fingers tangled in hers pinning her left hand down on the bed as they kissed and fucked and got lost in each other.  She came again, hard enough that her whole body clenched around him and she must have left bruises where her heels and her fingernails connected with his back, but he only seemed to be more caught up in her, gasping and groaning as he fucked her and laid a fierce kiss on her throat just below her jaw.  It was as she opened her eyes and locked gazes with him that he came inside her with a groan and a shudder, bringing her back to the brink for a third time as she felt his sweet heat fill her. 

            Afterward, Dany laid in his arms, her head on his chest over one of his scars, his left hand on her hip as his right tangled in hers, bringing her fingers to his lips over and over.  She felt warm and satisfied, full of bubbling heat that brought a soft smile to her face.  After what felt like hours and mere minutes like that, Jon brushed the softest of kisses to her temple and whispered, “So long as I hold you, Daenerys Targaryen, I’ll never feel lonely again and I’m going to make sure you never do either.”

            And she didn’t feel lonely.  For the first time in her life, she felt warm and safe and whole, wanting nothing more than to hold what she already had.


	8. Fire and Blood

            Over the next few days, Dany presided over countless council meetings, trained with the dragons and sometimes Jon when he had time, occasionally checked in on Jon and the men she’d allotted him to mine the dragonglass caves, harassed the wardrobe master and armorer to streamline their designs further and further, and either summoned Jon to her chamber or made the long walk to his at night.  So far, they were managing their time outside the bedroom with a good level of decency and maturity, though she still caught Missandei, Tyrion, and Davos eyeing them both now and then.

            There had been one moment in particular today during a rather lengthy and heated council session when she and Jon had gotten into a deep discussion over flying tactics.  They had been debating strategies for raids north of the Wall, whether they needed ground support and, if they did, what kind, what type of armor would be best suited to the dragons for both protection and mobility, what they would do if the dragons struggled in the cold, how they could inflict maximum damage on the Army of the Dead in short raids.  At one point, Jon had suggested that they lead the dragons in three individual figure-eight patterns over the dead, making them harder to track with any crossbows or spears that the dead might possess.  Dany had argued with him that the dragons weren’t halfway disciplined enough for such a maneuver, but Jon had argued right back.  “They chase each other in figure-eights all the time trying to outdo each other.  Rhaegal doesn’t have a rider to guide him, but he’s the best flyer and he knows it.  If you and I lead Drogon and Viserion in opposing figure-eights, he’ll join in and try to outdo us both.”

            “Even if we could pull off something so convoluted, you’d be ash by the end of it!” she had pointed out harshly.  “Flying over and around each other while breathing fire down on the dead?  Forget the crossbowmen, you’ll be killed by Drogon or Rhaegal in minutes.”

            “Maybe if we tried it now, but if we trained them on the maneuver before adding in the _dracarys_ , they’re smart enough and skilled enough to pull it off.  Viserion won’t let me burn.”

            It had floored her, both his argument and his resolve, and she’d fallen quiet at that moment, caught in a staredown with Jon as all their advisors looked on.  His face was flushed and his eyes were dark and wild in that way that she only saw right before he fucked her.  He knew he was right, that it was a good plan, an excellent plan, and that the dragons could carry it out with the proper training.  And he knew that she’d given him the right to challenge her like this in front of her councilors.  He could be so reserved and so self-conscious at times that in that moment, she wanted the rest of the room to just evaporate so she could fuck him right there on the Painted Table and relish that raw confidence.  As warmth pooled below her belly and as her blood simmered in her veins, she raised an eyebrow at him and coolly said, “We’ll see.  When this is done, we’ll give it a go and maybe I’ll let Drogon take a shot at you to be sure.”

            Jon raised an eyebrow right back and the corner of his mouth quirked just enough for her to see.  “They can do it.  And let him at me.  If you’re short a King in the North, I expect all of this will become much simpler for you.”

            _Seven Hells…._   “Indeed.  Groleo, Grey Worm, where are we on the Targaryen fleet?”

            The rest of the meeting had been tedious and painful to endure, seeming to take several hours when in reality it was likely less than one.  When the session was closed, she dismissed her councilors, then looked to Jon.  “I will have words with the King in the North.”

            The councilors quietly left them the room, Davos shutting the door discreetly behind him with the slightest smirk, leaving the two of them alone.  Jon looked to her and said, “If I thought for a moment that they weren’t all talking behind our backs, I’d be concerned for your honor.  It’s one thing to refer to your betrothed as a king and another to refer to a mere consort that way.”

            She couldn’t help a snort as she turned to lean on the ledge at the mouth of the room where the sea spray hit her face.  “Missandei, Davos, and Tyrion knew minutes after we decided it, Varys a few minutes after that.  Missandei would have told Grey Worm.  Rahkarro and Aggo would have expected me to fuck you because that’s what khals do, they fuck whomever they want.  The rest of them would only need a few spare thoughts to piece together all those looks around the Table.  We had might as well already be married.”

            Normally she could recognize his footsteps, but he’d snuck up on her as quiet as Ghost and laid his hands over hers, pressed his lips to the corner of her jaw.  That soft pressure was enough to light a spark under her skin and she had to swallow hard to contain it.  “Is that true?  You want me bad enough that you think Rahkarro and Aggo can see it?  You’re not an easy person to read.”

            A longer, lingering kiss on her throat, making her eyelids droop.  No one had ever talked to her that way and in that setting, like they were equals.  It was challenging and exhilarating to debate with someone rather than just accepting or declining advice.  “Challenge me like that again and it will be very obvious to everyone how badly I want you.”

            Jon’s hands moved to her hips, pressing and squeezing as they moved down to her thighs, then back up to her waistline, then back down to her hips.  She was wearing a purple silk from Pentos that left about as much to the imagination as that red gown she’d worn the other night and the fabric pooled around his hands in bunches.  “Why do you think I was gripping the arms of my chair so hard?  I thought if I let go, I’d have you up on the Table in a moment.”

            Her blood was sizzling now, hot enough to burn out the synapses in her brain.  Images flooded her brain of Jon shoving her up on the Table, hoisting her skirts up to her hips and driving into her, deep inside her as she fell back and scattered those damn figurines.  She could feel his fingertips digging into her hips, his cock sliding deep inside her, so hot and so fast and so smooth.  Her mouth went dry and she smirked at the thought, savoring it.  “Tempting.  There’s too much to be done today, though.”

            “Before we leave Dragonstone, then,” Jon said, his voice hoarse.  His body was pressed to hers and she could feel his hardness at her lower back as he no doubt struggled to tame images similar to those she was fighting.  “After we take care of Greyjoy, after we finalize the plans for traveling north.”

            “After we no longer need those damned figurines in their proper places,” she finished.  It took a deep breath of salty air, then a long exhale to clear her head of those images, though.  “Yes.  I look forward to it.”

            A cry echoed through the grey fog that was pressing down on the island and the dragons flew low past them in a triangular formation, as if demonstrating that they were ready to learn and drill.  A smile lit her face and she turned her head to kiss Jon’s stubbled cheek.  “They’re waiting for us.”

            Jon sighed.  “They can wait a moment longer.”  Then, his mouth found hers and his hands on her hips turned her around to lean against the ledge as he kissed her, drowning out the worry and the headaches and the plans.  For just a moment, it was just them.

            He was right about the figure-eights.  Drogon and Viserion took to the maneuver with little prompting and much joy and Rhaegal quickly joined in in a bid to best them.  It took half the day to get Viserion and Drogon to fly in opposing directions through the maneuver, though.  Viserion was so used to looking to Drogon or Rhaegal for leadership that it took a great deal of subconscious prodding from Jon to get him to try opposing their lead.  Dany could feel it even several wingspans away as the air pulsed with Viserion’s muted thoughts.  She heard him less and less now that he had Jon to commune with and at times it bothered her, but for the most part it brought her relief.  Her Viserion was always so lonely, even with his brothers and with her.  It was soothing watching him connect with someone else and gain some self-confidence.

            _Viserion is Jon’s and Jon is Viserion’s,_ Drogon growled in her mind.  _And Jon is Mhysa’s and Mysa is Jon’s and Viserion is Mhysa’s.  Jon is smarter than the man with the knives, less proud, stronger.  Good for Viserion…Viserion does not know his limits as Drogon does.  Jon will ask him to find his limits and he will find them as Drogon did on his own.  Drogon knows who he is.  Mhysa knows who she is.  Does Jon know who Jon is?_

 _I think he does,_ she answered, stroking her son’s neck soothingly.  For all his fierce independence and arrogance, Drogon worried about his brothers and now Jon by extension, who had quickly become quite important to Viserion.  _I don’t think he has known long, though._

 _He is still growing into his skin,_ Drogon agreed.  _But he knows how much larger he must grow._

_Does Viserion know?_

_Locked beneath the pyramid, the dark, such dark, the stones all around and over us, no sky, no sky, noskynoskynosky…_ Rhaegal whispered through the void.

            No, of course Viserion did not know who he was yet.  A piece of him was still locked beneath the Great Pyramid, stunted and confused.  Rhaegal had recovered better, too caught up in his restored freedom to brood over the past too long.  But, as Rhaegal pointed out, a piece of Viserion was still locked up down there where she had chained him.  A dragon is not a slave.

            But Viserion did at last fly the figure-eight opposite Drogon while Rhaegal swooped around and in between them like a master acrobat, showing off and adding confusion and elegance to the maneuver.  It was disorienting and jarring to feel her children all around her, all out of sync and yet with a common goal of being out of sync even as they watched each other in their peripherals.  “ _Dracarys,_ ” Dany said to Drogon.  The great black dragon let loose a stream of black-red flame into the ocean, sending a column of steam rising from the waves in a wide arc. As Jon and Viserion swooped outward at the edge of their figure-eight, she heard Jon call out the same command, the word a rough growl on his northern tongue.  Viserion let out a proud golden _dracarys_ into the sea as Drogon had and Rhaegal, not to be outdone, released his own _dracarys_ as he dove low to the waves, then lurched back upward again, missing Drogon by a wing’s beat.  Yes.  They could do this.  They could make this work.

            That evening, she was curled up in her steaming hot copper tub half-asleep with exhaustion when she heard the doorknob turn.  Her eyes snapped open to meet Jon’s as he quietly shut the door behind him.  His dark blue tunic was loose at the collar and his boots quiet on the stone floor as he approached, his eyes raking over her body.  “Your Unsullied still don’t know what to make of me.  I think if you hadn’t granted me safe passage they would have gutted me right there just for approaching.”

            A half-smile curved her mouth at the thought of her stoic Unsullied guards gritting their teeth as they let Jon past into her chambers.  She gestured to the comfy chair beside the fire, which Jon accepted without taking his eyes off her.  The attention made her skin prickle with warmth and she stretched her arms out above her languorously, enough to make his lips part with want.  “The Unsullied enjoy their rules.  They used to grant access to my chamber to Daario Naaharis, but did not like or approve of him.  They are still deciding on whether they approve of you.”

            Jon frowned at the name, but still didn’t take his eyes off her, resting his elbows on his knees as he studied her form just visible through the scented bath water.  “What was he like?  Daario?”

            _Are you jealous, Jon Snow?_   She quirked an eyebrow upward at him and smiled teasingly.  “Nothing like you.”

            “Is that good or bad?” Jon asked, trying for a teasing tone and failing.

            For all his confidence discussing troop placements in the North or battle tactics against the Army of the Dead, she noted that he still worried about how he stood with her.  He needn’t worry and, with a frown, it occurred to her that he needed a little assurance of that.  “Good.  Daario was all arrogance and lust and reveling in the fight.  I thought I wanted that, but I felt nothing when I left him behind in Meereen.  I shed no tears, hardly batted an eye.  That was when I realized I had no idea what love was.”

            He met her eyes then, the firelight glinting off his dark irises and revealing flecks of silver in them.  “And now?”

            He was too far away, well out of arm’s reach, and her fingers itched to take hold of him and kiss him until they both forgot Daario’s name.  She sat up in the tub and extended a hand to him, crooking her finger to call him closer.  Jon hesitated only a moment before he moved forward to kneel beside the tub and reach under the water to run his fingertips up her ribs and around the curve of one breast.  Dany meanwhile stroked his beard up his jawline, then his temple down to the edge of one scar.  His breathing seemed to come easier and she whispered to him, “I know I couldn’t leave you and feel nothing.  You fill a hole inside my heart I didn’t know existed, Jon.  I think if you weren’t there I’d be bleeding inside, dying from an open wound.”

            Jon smiled in a self-deprecating way and said, “You did throw a _dracarys_ at me this afternoon.”

            “I warned you that I would.  And you were right, Viserion wouldn’t let you burn.”

            The smile turned more genuine and the pad of his thumb traced circles slowly around her right breast, raising gooseflesh all over her body.  “You did warn me and I do know you better than to discount any threat you make as idle.”

            “Good.”  She smiled and reached out to take hold of his tunic by the collar and pull him down to her for a kiss.  Gods, she couldn’t get over the way he kissed.  Kisses had happened with Daario and with Drogo, but they were never priorities, never an end in themselves.  Jon was different.  When their lips touched, her chest expanded with a gasp and then sank inward until her muscles went weak.  There was something incredibly erotic about the way his tongue felt as it teased her lower lip, then as it stroked hers and tasted her, especially since what he’d done to her that first night.  She couldn’t stop thinking of how _that_ kiss had felt and having his tongue in her mouth brought those memories back in vivid clarity.  But it was like every move Jon made with his mouth shattered her inside and turned her molten.  Gods, she loved it.  She tugged on his tunic harder and he responded immediately, kissing her more forcefully, teasing her mouth open with his tongue so they could taste each other.  His hand curved around her breast, her nipple caught between his thumb and forefinger, and she moaned, her body humming with electricity.

            Jon struggled to his feet, his lips not leaving hers, and seemed ready to scoop her out of the tub and carry her to the bed.  With a smirk, she tugged on him again with one hand as she knocked the arm holding him upright off balance.  Before he could catch himself, half of Jon landed in a heap in the tub on top of her, splashing water halfway across the room.  “Seven Hells!” Jon called out, sitting in her lap dripping wet.  A laugh bubbled up inside Dany and when Jon shook his head like a wet dog, his hair falling everywhere in dripping tendrils, she started laughing aloud.  Jon glared at her, but his mouth was crooked with a humor he was trying to hide.  “What was that for?”

            She was still laughing, almost too hard to get her response out.  “I couldn’t help it…gods…I’m sorry, but I just had to…”

            Jon’s dark eyes sparked.  “We’ll see about that.”  In a moment, he was on his feet again and scooping her out of the tub, dripping everywhere and laughing her ass off.  He quite literally threw her onto the bed and followed her, stripping off his clothes on the way.  She tried to watch him do it, but laughter kept forcing her eyes shut.  Then, he was lying over her, his mouth drowning her giggles.  The kiss was fast and deep and forceful, enough to push all the breath from her lungs and set her hands to clutching at his back, urging him on.  Jon’s fingertips dug into her hip, lifting her enough off the bed to feel his member sliding between her folds.  _Oh gods…._   Her back arched pressing her body into him, and she moaned in need.  Jon’s hand slid slowly over her ass to her upper thigh, and then…

            _Smack!_

            She flinched and managed to pull her mouth free of his, her ass stinging where he’d slapped her.  “Did you just smack my ass?”

            “That’s what you get for playing games with me,” he said, his voice a low, rough whisper on her lips.  “Want another?”

            Now that he mentioned it, she was so hot and wet for him right then he could have slipped right inside her to the hilt and she only would have wanted him deeper.  She wasn’t about to admit that to him, though.  “Do it again and soon it’ll be me smacking your ass, Jon Snow.”

            _Smack!_   Harder this time so her skin burned, then, with a chuckle, he asked, “Is that a promise, love?”

            _Smack!_   Jon flinched far more dramatically than she had, perhaps because she’d managed to hit him that much harder.  Dany couldn’t help a sly grin as she watched Jon’s seductive expression turn almost brain-dead with mixed lust and surprise.  “Yes,” she said coolly.  “I thought you said you knew me well enough to know I don’t make idle threats.”

            Jon shook his head in disbelief, then leaned down to kiss her hard and fast, his hand curving around and gripping her ass where he’d slapped her.  “Promise me…” he said between kisses, “That this ass is mine and mine alone and I’ll never smack it again.”

            “Let’s not jump to extremes just yet,” Dany said.  When Jon paused, she ran her hand slowly up his thigh, over his perfect, muscular ass, and up his back to his shoulder.  “I promise you, Jon, that my ass and every other part of me is yours, just like every part of you is mine.  And maybe we don’t need to rule out spankings just yet, but we could avoid leaving bruises.  I think that seems fair.”

            “It does.”  Jon grinned and leaned down to kiss her again, slow and then faster, building in speed and force and tenderness.  It was like having a conversation with someone, particularly having a conversation about the relationship you shared.  His kisses were full of _I adore you_ ’s, _I want you_ ’s, and questions, mostly about how badly she wanted him.  She had learned the language quickly in the last few days and now she used it, telling him over and over again without saying the words out loud, _I love you_.

            When time and space no longer existed, she laid her hands on him and pressed him down into her, both of them gasping between kisses as he entered her, filling her and stretching her until her eyelids fell and her eyes rolled back in ecstasy.  He moved slowly in and out of her, rolling his hips to hit every centimeter of her channel, making her moan and gasp until her legs stiffened and her toes curled.  _More…I need more._   Dany grabbed him by the hip to still him for a moment, slipped her leg between his, then pressed him down on her once more.  They both gasped at the tightness and the angle and Dany’s back arched enough to press her breasts into his chest.  Jon clutched her to him and growled in her ear before he gripped her by the ass to hold her to him and began pumping in and out over and over, faster and faster.  _More…more…gods, please, more…._   Jon kissed her neck, his tongue teasing at her skin, and he pressed her outside leg closer into him, tightening her further until he was rubbing _right there_ with every thrust, until she was panting and gasping and moaning, all but screaming his name.  “Come on, love,” Jon murmured to her, his voice a full octave lower than usual.  “Come on, I want to watch you.”

            His words put her right over the edge and then she was crying out and moaning and seeing stars.  He growled again and came with her, all his muscles seizing as he did.  “Dany…” he groaned.  “Gods…”

            It was as she lay curled up in his arms later, listening to his steady, sleepy breaths, that she tried to place the last time she’d been called “Dany,” the last time anyone had thought of her by that name.  It had to have been Viserys, making him perhaps the only one to see inside her.  Until now.  Thoughts of Viserys made her feel faintly nauseous, but she kept replaying the way the name “Dany” had rolled off of Jon’s northern tongue and found she liked it.  It felt so good to have someone who loved you for who you were underneath, not your titles or your body or your usefulness as a _cyvasse_ piece.

            He loved Dany.  Just Dany.

 

\-----------------------------

 

            All of her pushing with the armorer finally paid off two days later when she and the dragons had their first and final fitting with the new armor.  For the dragons, the armorer had designed chainmail with layers of steel overlaying it in layers not unlike scales which were intended to give the dragons some mobility.  Getting the armor on was a tricky business, one that rested entirely on her and Jon since they were the only ones willing and able to get close enough to the dragons.  They ended up accomplishing the task only when Dany climbed atop the dragon, Jon coaxed them to stand over the armor, and then he lifted up the heavy straps to Dany to fasten over the dragon’s back.  Viserion seemed only mildly upset by this, but both Drogon and Rhaegal chafed at the feeling of limitation that the armor brought them and both took off, armor and all, to make a few disgruntled laps around the island.

            Dany’s new wardrobe and armor were ready too.  Her new overcoat for flying was heavy boiled leather in Targaryen black with trailing skirts cut in sections for mobility in the air.  Underneath she’d been given a layer of chainmail that made her bones ache to carry and a steel breastplate.  The last piece was the helmet that she’d had a heavy hand in designing with plenty of space around the eyes for maximum peripheral vision, spikes atop the head just like her dragons’, and an opening at the back of the skull through which she could pull her braid and have it loose while flying.  This detail had driven the armorer half-mad, but she insisted upon it, repeating to him over and over that a khaleesi’s hair was a symbol of her status and strength and she would not have it trapped in a sweaty lump inside her helmet while she fought.

            That first test flight with the armor was miserable.  She felt cramped and stiff and she could feel that same sensation rippling through her dragons, causing ever increasing levels of frustration, particularly with Drogon, who took the new situation with his usual rogueish hate for any limitation.  _A dragon is not a slave…Mhysa has put us in chains…why has Mhysa put us in chains?_

 _They’re not chains, love,_ she insisted, trying her best to soothe him as they coasted over the sea.  _They are armor like your lovely scales to protect you from their spears._   She sent him the painful image she’d never forget of him taking on the Sons of the Harpy in the fighting pit at Meereen and earning himself several spears for his trouble.  Drogon shuddered beneath her at the memory and quieted.

            After their second test flight, Dany held a council meeting to hammer out the details of their plan for taking on the Greyjoy fleet.  A great deal of the plan rested on winging it and dealing with the consequences as they came, but there was no help for it.  They had already lost several days preparing for the battle and the Greyjoys were doubtless only a few days away.  When they had determined that the dragons and the Unsullied were as well prepared as they could be under the circumstances, Dany ordered the Targaryen fleet to set sail at first light the next morning and the dragons with it.

            That night, she caught Jon studying her armor with narrowed eyes, inspecting it for the slightest defect.  He said nothing, though, and she said nothing about the fact that he’d be flying in just his leathers and borrowed chainmail.  The moment they voiced their doubts about the operation was the moment it would fail.  _And the wheel will grind over us, the direwolf and the dragon crushed beneath the lion and the kraken._

            Missandei roused them in the early, pitch dark hours of the morning and helped Dany braid her hair into half a dozen braids that joined at one powerful plait down her back.  The girl’s hands shook as she did the clasps on Dany’s armor, then pulled on her overcoat and did the fastenings.  When it was done, Dany reached out and laid a hand on Missandei’s cheek.  “I’m coming back,” she said, her voice solid with resolve.  “I’m coming back with my children and Jon and the Greyjoys will be scattered to the winds.”

            “Of course, Your Grace,” Missandei said shakily.  For a moment, they just looked at one another, then embraced in a fierce hug.

            Jon had beaten her down to the cliffs and had managed to armor Viserion by himself before she got there.  The fastenings on the dragons’ armor was even more difficult in the dark and Drogon snarled a warning at both of them when Dany accidentally overtighten one of his fastenings.  When a silvery light seemed into the sky, they watched in silence as the Targaryen fleet, twenty ships, began its venture south along the Narrow Sea.  Dawn broke with a golden and red sunrise, like fires lighting the horizon.  The sight brought on a sharp memory of that morning when dawn had broken over her and her baby dragons and she had watched the red comet light the sky as she nursed them.  _That’s dragonfire on the horizon.  Fire and blood._

            “Fire and blood,” Jon whispered, echoing her thoughts.  “How far out do you think they are?”

            “Euron Crowseye has sailed over more of the world than any other living captain,” she said.  “Not even a hurricane could slow down the _Silence_.  We might reach them today.”

            Jon nodded stiffly, then bent to rub Ghost’s ears and neck.  “I’ll be back,” he promised the great white direwolf.  “I know this island is no place for you.  I’ll be back soon and we’ll go north, I promise.”

            The direwolf leaned his head into Jon’s chest in what Dany thought resembled an embrace.

            They took off with Davos and the council watching from the cliffs, every one of them wringing their hands.

            The dragons soon got over their angst at wearing their armor when it became clear that this would be a long flight over the open water, a flight fueled by freedom and speed and fresh air.  The Targaryen fleet was making good time on favorable winds and they swooped back around to check on their progress every quarter of an hour or so.  By several hours in, Dany was stiff and sore from lack of sleep, her heavy armor, and the energy it took to ride.  She stretched this way and that, but what her muscles really ached for was a sign of the Greyjoy fleet and the adrenaline rush of battle.

            It was nearly nightfall and Dany’s entire body ached.  Even her insides groaned with hunger and stiffness.  Jon looked as uncomfortable as her and kept fingering the hilt of his sword, Longclaw, which she’d returned to him.  She could see that he was itching for battle as much as she was and knew she would have to keep an eye on him.  The first chance he got, he’d have both feet on the deck of a ship and his sword in his hands.

            They were ranging beyond the Targaryen fleet and sunset was approaching when she saw the blood red sails on the horizon, closely followed by black sails emerging from the fog.  All the stiffness turned to energy in her muscles and her eyes darted to Jon.  He was looking right back at her and nodded, following her as she banked to turn back and warn the fleet.  Within a mile, they swooped around the fleet, Drogon roaring a _dracarys_ that sent a column of steam up from the sea.  The sailors and the Unsullied aboard the ships leapt to action, shields and spears finding hands all around. 

            _It is almost time,_ she whispered to Drogon and Rhaegal.  _Our enemies are near, ripe for burning._

            The dragons screeched their righteous fury and excitement.  _We will burn them as we did the slavers, Mhysa,_ Drogon returned, his internal thoughts laced with pride and confidence.  _They will burn and drown and bow to our fury._

            Dany led the dragons back around the fleet once more, raising a fist in the air and calling out to her men, “Fire and blood!” over and over as they returned the call.  “Fire and blood!”

            The Greyjoy ships broke the horizon once more and they stared death in the face as more sails and more appeared in the distance.  There were easily a hundred ships, led by the _Silence,_ and even at this distance, they could hear the roars of the Ironborn.  Dany looked to Jon, who nodded, his face set in grim determination.  Then, they were off, arcing up into the sky and banking wide to the fringes of the Greyjoy fleet.  When they were within range, Daenerys led Drogon in a downspiral that the other dragons followed and then, staring down at the suddenly quiet and awestruck Ironborn, she bellowed the command, “ _Dracarys!”_

            All three dragons unleashed hell upon the ship, their flame ripping through men, deck, and hold until the ship was splintering and sinking into the boiling sea, until the cries of the wounded drowned out the roars of the remaining Ironborn.  When the ship was clearly out of commission, Dany led the dragons onward to another ship on the fringes and together they set that one alight too.  By now the fleet was responding and scattered arrows hissed past them, but the Ironborn were not known for their archers.  A third ship slipped into the sea and then they set alight a fourth that lagged in the rear of the convoy.  With a _ka-chunk!_ , a ballista fired and a great iron spear ripped through the air past Drogon’s left wing.  Rage pumped through her veins and Drogon roared balefully as they dove to the ship responsible.  Drogon swooped low to this ship and directed his _dracarys_ right at the ballista, instantly obliterating it and the men manning it and, within moments, sending the entire ship to the depths.  Viserion and Rhaegal were seeking vengeance on the machine as well, seeking out ballistae on the ships and blowing them to bits with _dracarys_ upon _dracarys_ until the Ironborn ships were floundering, steering awkwardly around the burning wrecks as they fought to avoid the perimeter of the convoy. 

            Then, the Targaryen fleet met the Ironborn head-on, men leaping between ships to fight tooth and nail for control of each vessel.  Spears and swords clashed and drew blood that ran in rivers across decks and bodies fell into the sea where they floated limp and lifeless.  Dany pulled Drogon back out to the perimeter to meet Jon, Viserion, and Rhaegal and help take out the outlying ships.  Ballistae still dared to fire at them and now trebuchets joined the fight, launching lit barrels filled with pitch into the air and lighting up Targaryen ships.  “We need to take out the trebuchets!” Jon called to her.  She nodded in agreement and sent her rage pulsing through the air to the dragons, who agreed on this new course, slicing through the air to the nearest ship armed with a trebuchet and sending it down into boiling water before it could be fired again. 

            Faint among the screams and roars, Dany heard a horn blow, a long, mournful sound.  The dragons roared and hissed their hatred for the sound and seemed to want to flee it, but Dany fought them and held them back from retreat.  _Let us burn that evil noise!_ she called out in their shared minds.  _Let us burn it!_

            The dragons needed little prodding and in moments, they were level with the _Silence,_ which was covered in battling bodies and blood-soaked decks.  The horn blew again and the dragons all shuddered in discomfort and hatred for the sound.  Then, Dany’s eyes alighted on Euron Greyjoy at the helm, bellowing into an ancient horn.  He met her eyes and with a wild grin shouted up to her, “I’ll have your dragons, Daenerys!  I’ll have them under my boot and I’ll fuck you bloody!”

            Completely unbidden by her, Dany watched as all three dragons roared out _dracaryses_ , turning the Crowseye into a human torch, horn and all.  Within seconds, the flames had turned him to nothing more than ash and the _Silence_ was floundering, its rear plunging deeper and deeper into the sea as the men on the decks screamed. 

            Without a parting thought, Dany pulled Drogon up back into the open air and the others followed them.  Out of the range of the ballistae and arrows, Dany looked to Jon, whose face was stone-like with grim anger and vengeance.  “Was that you or them?” she asked him.

            His voice was like ice.  “Both.  We need to start pushing them to retreat.”

            Dany nodded her agreement and they banked around, circling the Greyjoy ships in their figure-eights to avoid the remaining brave ballista operators.  They fired _dracarys_ after _dracarys_ down upon the fleet, damaging ships and urging on those who had begun to turn and retreat southward.  They had considered trying to force the fleet to surrender and give up their ships to the Targaryen fleet, but what they collectively knew about the Ironborn told them that they would fight to the last man and that they’d sooner escape to Pyke than turn over their fleet. 

            When their route brought them back around, Dany saw that the _Silence_ had slipped beneath the waves.  They arced back around and sent _dracaryses_ rippling through the sea around the ships watching as the ships turned for south and the long journey home.  When every ship had turned southward to flee, the dragons and the Targaryen fleet pursued them, bringing down the ships that lagged behind the others.  They pursued them deep into the night, until the Ironborn outpaced the Targaryen ships and vanished into the darkness.

          “We did it,” she said aloud, her blood singing with pride and flame.

          Jon met her eyes, grinning so hard his eyes crinkled.  “Fire and blood.”


	9. Mine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for my absence....real life just stinks sometimes, but I'm trying to get back to writing. Hopefully this update will be followed by one on my other fic, "The House with the Red Door," soon. Hope you enjoy this chapter...it's the last one on Dragonstone before we travel north.

            That night as they flew through the darkness beneath a million gleaming stars, Dany’s blood hummed with adrenaline, victory, and power.  Despite the grueling flight, the dragons couldn’t resist throwing themselves into occasional loops and rolls, screaming their pride into the otherwise soundless sky.  She felt like screaming too, like screaming and flying and fucking.  She looked across the dark void at Jon.  The moonlight glinted off his raven-black hair and sparked in his eyes and his smile as he returned her gaze.  She could see the adrenaline boiling in his eyes just as she felt it in hers.  She scanned the sea stretched out below them, seeking a spot of darkness that reflected no stars.  “Let’s take a rest,” she called to Jon.  She mentally pointed out the small island to Drogon and they led the others downward.

            Despite their pride and energy, the dragons were more than happy to rest their wings and stalk around the rocky island scorching trees and searching for food.  Dany’s legs shook as she stood on the pebble beach and removed her helmet, letting it fall to the ground with a _clank._   She ran her hands through her braids, massaging her aching head.  “Gods,” she groaned.  “I could kill for a bath right about now.”

            Jon chuckled quietly and she heard the ring of chainmail dropping to rock.  She turned in time to watch him peel off his jerkin and toss it onto his growing pile of clothing.  “I know you prefer your bath one degree shy of boiling, but I think the sea will be just fine for me.”

            Her eyebrows shot up and her pulse began to race as she studied the way the light of the moon and stars made his chest glow, his scars standing out in slashes across his smooth skin.  The blue light arced off his swordhilt as he undid his belt and laid Longclaw atop his pile.  “You’re going to swim in that?” she asked incredulously.  “It can’t be much better than freezing.”

            Jon nodded his head, smirking at her.  “I spent most of my life ignoring freezing cold.  I’ve gotten good at it.”  Before she could come up with a reply, he kicked off his boots and started unlacing his trousers.  “Are you joining me?”

            _Seven Hells, is my mouth watering?  Gods…_   She blinked hard to wake herself up and unclasped her overcoat, letting it fall to the rocks around her.  “Are you going to keep me warm?”

            The smirk turned to a grin as he left his trousers behind and began backing towards the water.  Her eyes dropped and became locked on his large, pink cock, noticing only vaguely that he didn’t even flinch at the temperature of the water around his ankles.  Apparently, the adrenaline from the battle had sent his blood pounding through him too, and most of it had ended up in one place.  “I can’t say I have the blood of the dragon,” he said huskily, “but I’ll do my best.”

            _Gods._   It took twice as long as it should have to get her armor and chainmail off because her manic blood had her hands shaking.  By the time she stood naked in the moonlight, Jon’s eyes on her, he was neck-deep in the Narrow Sea and had already dunked his head once so his black curls shimmered with water droplets.  “Come on in, love,” he said, his voice low and soft.

            Dany stepped forward and flinched at the chill of the water.  It wasn’t far above freezing after all and she could already feel goosebumps creeping along her skin.  “Gods, how do you stand this?” she asked him as she inched forward, the water lapping at her knees.

            Jon laughed softly and glided through the water to meet her as the water climbed to her waist, making her cringe.  He stood, water dripping off of him, and held out his hands to take hers and walk with her deeper in.  She cringed again as the water hit her belly and she shook her head in awe at the fact that Jon was still rock-hard and fully erect despite the cold.  “I’ve been in far colder places,” Jon said.  “And with the high from the battle and with watching you get naked in front of me…hells, I can’t even feel the cold.”

            She snorted, but found herself grimacing as her breasts dropped below the water.  “Gods,” she hissed.

            Jon chuckled and stopped, his hands releasing hers in favor of cupping her breasts.  “Cold, love?” he asked as he teased at her very erect nipples.

            “A bit.  Jon…”

            But she didn’t get any farther than that.  A moment later, his mouth was on hers, electricity was arcing along her nerve endings, and she couldn’t feel the cold either.  Dany wrapped her arms over his broad shoulders and wrapped her legs around his waist, losing herself in him in seconds.  Gods, his skin was warm despite the cold water and the way his member felt against her center made her eyes roll back.  The kiss quickened and deepened and soon they were drowning in each other, her tongue dancing with his, a brush of teeth on a lower lip, a quick suck on a tongue or lip.  She knew nothing but Jon all around her, his hands on her, his arms around her, his lips on hers, his tongue in her mouth.  His hands found her hips and brought her down on him, her lips parting into a wide “O” as he filled her.  “Oh…gods, Jon…” she moaned.

            “Seven hells,” he groaned.  “I’ve been wanting to do that for hours.”

            “Fuck, yes….”  She kissed him once more, needing his lips like she needed air, and used her grip on him to slowly rock up and down him.  Jon growled and helped her with his hands on her hips and ass, his fingers digging into her flesh.  Her brain went numb and her muscles took over, her hands wandering, her nails breaking his skin when he brought her down hard and deep, her teeth catching on his lip and making his breath hitch. 

            They came together, crying out in the empty night, eyes blackened by lust locked on each other.  As she came down, Dany’s muscles went limp and her upper body folded backwards so she floated on top of the water, Jon’s hands on her lower back to support her.  “You’re right,” she mumbled, gasping for breath.  “It’s not cold at all.”

 

\------------------------

 

            They arrived back at Dragonstone half a day ahead of the Targaryen fleet to the immense relief of their counselors.  Word from Varys’s little birds had reached Dragonstone just after they flew south confirming that the Greyjoys and the Dornish had been turned over to Cersei Lannister before Euron Greyjoy sailed for Dragonstone and that their allies had disappeared into the black cells.  An estimate of the size of Euron Greyjoy’s fleet had come with the news putting the krakens at several hundred ships, now knocked down to scarcely a hundred by the dragons and the Targaryen fleet.

            A raven had arrived from Winterfell too and it was as they were sitting in the Room of the Painted Table with aching muscles and tired eyes debriefing with their counselors that Jon read the scroll.  Dany read Jon’s face as he read the scroll and saw that much of the letter unsettled him.  “What is it?” she asked.

            Jon ran his fingers over the scroll again, flattening it on the edge of the table in The Bite.  “Bran and Arya.  They’re alive and they’re home at Winterfell.  I thought they were dead.”

            “I’m happy for you,” she said.  Jon still looked perturbed, though, and appeared to be reading the letter for a third time.  “You don’t look happy.”

            His brow was creased so severely that he looked to be twice his age.  “Littlefinger is still creeping about Winterfell and the lords of the North are restless.  Many of them have returned to their keeps to prepare their people for war.  Bran has seen the Army of the Dead approaching Eastwatch.  I have a man there holding the Wall with the Wildlings, but they’re not properly trained and there aren’t enough of them.”

            Unease rustled through the room and Dany’s eyes flicked to Ser Davos and Varys.  “Have we had word from White Harbor or Eastwatch?”

            “Both fleets have sailed, Your Grace,” Ser Davos said in his gruff sailor’s voice.  Varys pursed his lips and added, “Storms have been rolling through the North, Your Grace, and may slow the Eastwatch fleet.  No such reports have come from the White Harbor area, though.”

            She nodded to them.  “Good.  Then at least we can count on the White Harbor ships arriving safely and timely.  Where are we on the drawing of supply lines?”

            Tyrion set down the wine goblet he’d been idly clasping.  He’d been trying to take her warning about only advising her in complete sentences to heart, but it seemed that he still needed to hold a wine goblet while listening to grim news.  “Our new supply lines are set and have been confirmed by our contacts.  Our imports from Pentos have been directed to be split between Dragonstone and White Harbor by way of Braavos.  From Braavos, we also have a new line going up The Shivering Sea to Eastwatch.  White Harbor supplies can be ferried up the White Knife to Winterfell.”

            “We need to settle our travel plans,” she said, eyeing Jon.  He was still staring down at that raven scroll as if wishing his sister Sansa would materialize out of it so they could speak properly.  He would be itching to get back to Winterfell now that he had his dragonglass, which her men had been mining all the last week.  The White Harbor fleet would still be nearly a week north of Dragonstone and every day wasted was a day the Army of the Dead marched further south.  The dead would surely beat the Unsullied to the Wall if they waited for the Eastwatch fleet.  “The Targaryen fleet and the dragons could be readied to leave in a matter of days to get the council, the dragonglass, and initial contingents north as soon as possible.”

            Jon’s head snapped up and his eyes locked on her.  Before he could speak, Varys said anxiously, “Lannister forces have begun to muster in the West and the Crownlands, Your Grace.  Euron Greyjoy drew first blood in this war and you have now drawn second.  Cersei already knows what happened to her fleet and she will be vengeful.”

            Her veins began to buzz and she had to grit her teeth to hold back a hiss of frustration.  If not for the Army of the Dead, her men would already be standing on the soil of Westeros, marching towards Casterly Rock and King’s Landing.  “Fortunately, we have already decided to leave eight thousand men here to hold Dragonstone and respond to threats from King’s Landing.”

            “They cannot respond without ships, Your Grace,” Groleo said nervously.  “We need the Targaryen fleet here to give them the mobility they require.”

            In her peripheral vision, she could see Jon and Davos looking tense enough to shatter on a single word.  They needed to get north now and if they waited for the White Harbor fleet, it would be nearly three weeks before they set foot on northern soil and several weeks more before they made it to Winterfell or Eastwatch.  There was another option that could get them north faster, a risky option.  She turned it over slowly in her head, then voiced it.  “What if we split the Targaryen fleet?  We could send half the fleet north with the dragonglass we have, the council, and what men we can carry.  The rest of the fleet and the men would remain here, continuing to mine the dragonglass.  When the White Harbor fleet arrives, they can begin ferrying the rest of the men and glass north and when the Targaryen ships makes White Harbor, we can send them back to Dragonstone to help hold the island.”

            “It would work,” Groleo said, a bit of a gleam in his tired eyes.  “We could even split the fleets to start contingents north towards Eastwatch if Your Grace wishes.  The northern seas are dangerous in winter, but until the cold winds pick up, they still provide a quicker route than land travel from White Harbor.”

            “Excellent,” she said crisply.  Somewhere to the south of the island, Rhaegal roared his approval of the plan.

            Jon’s eyes were boring into her skull, but Tyrion was the next to respond, worried canyons breaking out in his expression.  He interlaced and worried at his fingers as he spoke.  “Your Grace, just because Lord Snow can forgive a daughter for her father’s crimes does not mean all the North can.  Half the Targaryen fleet could scarcely carry a thousand men loaded down with the dragonglass we’ve mined.”

            She bristled at the implications of his words and laid her hands on the Table just north of the Wall.  “My Lord Hand, we must treat our allies with the respect and trust they grant us.  King Jon knew what he was risking when he invited a Dothraki horde to the North, but he invited us anyway.  A thousand men split between White Harbor and the Wall seems to me an ideal size for quick travel and a suitable balance between security for ourselves and minimal perceived threat to the northern locals.  I am not coming to conquer the North, I am coming to save it, and this force would have the opportunity to act as ambassador to the North before forty thousand foreigners set foot on Northern soil.”

            “Your Grace,” Jon said, his voice rough as sand.  She held her queen’s mask in place as she met his eyes.  “I can arrange to have a small contingent of my own men meet us at White Harbor to travel with us.  It would send a good message to the people and I give you my word that no man under my banner would pose any threat to you or yours.”

            Tyrion looked ready to crawl out of his skin with anxiety at the suggestion and Dany couldn’t help thinking of the scars on her lover’s chest from when his own men had betrayed him once before.  But having Stark men with Stark banners and Stark emblems on their armor riding alongside her Dothraki and Unsullied would make for a great message.  She gave Tyrion a long look, reading him and allowing him to read her.  “How many men would you suggest?”

            “Two score,” Jon answered immediately.  “Just enough to give the right message and handle any trouble we encounter with the Northerners.  I don’t expect difficulties, but if they arise it is better that I address them myself.”

            The anxious glint in Tyrion’s eyes faded and one eyebrow rose ever so slightly, as if he was admitting to being the least bit impressed.  “Perfect,” she said, breaking eye contact with Tyrion to look to Jon, allowing him to see the gratitude in her eyes.  “I will leave it to you, then, Your Grace, to arrange our escort.”  She looked then to Rahkarro and Aggo and spoke in Dothraki.  “Choose from among my bloodriders our five hundred strongest and most loyal men.  They will travel north with me to guard my back and map the North with their horses’ hooves.  When their brothers arrive, they will be captains of riding parties.”

            “It will be done, Khaleesi,” Rahkarro said, fisting a large hand over his heart.  “Your bloodriders shall draw blood fighting for the honor to ride with you.”

            She couldn’t resist a smile.  “See that the losers of these fights are not too seriously injured.  We need every man strong for the great battle against the ice men.”

            “No Dothraki would be so weak as to fall before they may fight the ice men,” Aggo assured her with a lethal smile.  She returned the smile and a nod, then turned back to the rest of the council.  “Five hundred of my strongest and most loyal bloodriders will be chosen as the force that will travel north with us.  When the remaining Dothraki join us at Winterfell, these thousand will captain the riding parties which shall strengthen the North.”  She looked to Grey Worm then.  “I need you and your five hundred strongest men to prepare to travel to the Wall.  The majority of this group will be concentrated at Eastwatch and contingents will travel west to begin the work on the abandoned castles.”

            Grey Worm bowed his head stiffly.  “It will be done, my queen.”

            “Thank you, Your Grace. Every minute we have to prepare is precious,” Jon said, also with a bow of his head.  She couldn’t help her eyes from catching the way his black curls shifted as he moved.  She wanted him in her bed, looking young and carefree with his hair undone and wild around his face, the ends of those curls highlighting his cheekbones, his solid jawline, casting shadows over his dark eyes.  She wanted these dead men returned to the earth where they belonged where they couldn’t harm anyone, especially Jon, who’d spent years fighting them.

            Dany stood slowly and met each of her councilors’ eyes in turn.  “Each of you has many tasks to complete to prepare for this voyage and I must rest now.  We will reconvene over dinner this evening.  By then I want a firm estimate on how much time we need before we can set sail.”

            The councilors bowed their heads and murmured “Your Grace” or “Khaleesi” as she exited the room, her chainmail still hanging heavy on her shoulders.  Her body ached from her muscles down into the marrow of her bones and the spaces in her joints, but she found she liked the way she felt carrying her armor and mail, the way the metal hugged her body and commanded her muscles to hold her skeleton poised despite the weight.  She felt strong, powerful, and lethal.

            Missandei followed her to her chambers and helped her out of the armor, mail, and heavy clothes, then into a steaming hot bath.  Her eyelids fell in bliss as she sank into the tub and felt the knots in her muscles begin to unwind.  Missandei perched on a stool and began to slowly untie her wild hair from its braids.  “I am happy for you,” she said, a soft smile in her voice.

            The tiniest smile found Dany’s lips.  “For me?”

            “Yes.”  Missandei gently combed through a lock of hair and oiled it before continuing to untie the braid.  “Your King Jon seems a very worthy consort and I can see the way you look at each other.  It is my honor to know you best among your advisors, Your Grace, and though you try to hide it, I can see your happiness.  It brings me happiness too.”

            Her smile widened.  “Thank you, my friend.  I am happy.  I never imagined I would find a match like Jon.  A man who loves his people the way I do, who can love my dragons, who can love me for who I am inside.”

            “He’s quite handsome too,” Missandei said teasingly.  “And I never saw Your Grace blush that way when we talked about Daario.”

            Dany covered her mouth, but not before a foolish girl’s giggle escaped her lips.  “Gods, I am blushing, aren’t I?”

            “It is good, Your Grace,” Missandei assured her.  She was halfway up the knotted braid now and applying more oil.  “I am happy for you that he is a good match in _all_ the important ways.”

            Dany let out another laugh and met Missandei’s smiling eyes.  “You can tell that from my blushing?”

            Missandei raised an eyebrow.  “Your blushing and your tired eyes.  It would seem that you hardly sleep anymore, Your Grace.”

            “I do have quite a lot to keep me up at night.”

            “Quite a lot?” Missandei asked with a teasing grin.  Dany laughed and raised an eyebrow conspiratorially.  “Yes, _quite_ a lot.” 

            “He is very serious.”

            “Usually.”  An image flashed in her mind of pulling Jon, fully clothed, into the tub on top of her.  “Believe it or not, we have been known to make one another laugh.”

            “I am glad for it.  There is so little laughter in our company.”

            “There is.”  Dany softened as she caught the sliver of sadness in her friend’s voice.  She reached up to catch Missandei’s hand and looked over her shoulder to meet the girl’s dark eyes.  “I am sorry to send him so far from you.  I know it will not be easy.”

            Missandei stiffened and Dany saw the flicker of sadness in her almond-shaped eyes grow to much more.  The younger girl gripped Dany’s hand, grateful for the gesture.  “Grey Worm and I have never felt what we have for each other because it was easy.  It will be little worse than sending him to Casterly Rock as we originally planned.”

            “I know how little comfort that must be,” Dany said softly, imagining sending Jon back to the Wall, to the forefront of danger far from her.  The thought made her chest cave in with fear and pain and she realized suddenly that she could not bear such a thing.  She needed him by her side through this war, as her lover, her partner, her son Viserion’s rider, her king.  She would ensure that he stayed by her side and not only for selfish reasons.  She had seen how strong they could be together in the war room and on the battlefield.  She squeezed Missandei’s hand and said, “Help me get this mess unknotted and then go to him.  I should rest until dinner anyway.”

            Missandei shut her eyes tightly and nodded, then released Dany’s hand and returned to her task.

\-------------------------

            Dany spent their last days at Dragonstone in a whirl of plans, schemes, and dizzying emotions.  She did not know whether to feel panicked at having so little time left before going north or panicked at being bogged down in planning and losing time to prepare for war in the North where the war would be fought.  Jon was anxious as well and came to her chamber each night in a flurry of nerves and pent-up emotion.  They presided over tense council meetings, wrote and read what felt like hundreds of raven scrolls, and drilled with the dragons throughout the days.  By night they were so threadbare that being together just the two of them with all their hopes and fears and anxieties had them ripping apart at the seams and letting loose together.  One night, Dany rolled them over in bed and took charge on top, her hands clenching Jon’s and pinning them down on the bed hard enough that they both had white knuckles as she fucked him.  The next night, Jon shoved her up against a wall of her chamber, pulled her legs up around his waist, and ravaged her, leaving bite marks on her shoulder and fingernail scratches on her hips.

            Their last full day on Dragonstone finally came with plans to set sail for the mainland at sunrise the next morning.  The day was packed with a flurry of activity that included making sure the dragons’ armor and the dragonglass were properly packed, wrenching the final prototype of Dany’s own armor from the grasp of the armorer, enjoying more wine than was proper with Tyrion between council meetings, and riding her silver among the Unsullied and Dothraki camps to make certain for herself that her people were ready for everything they were poised to stand against.  The Dothraki were particularly put out by being forced to separate and submit to the plan to keep the Dothraki women and children on Dragonstone.  To quell the displeasure, it took shouting at them that only weak men would put their women and children at risk of starvation and freezing cold because they were unable to last a few months without a good fuck.  Despite the fact that they were going to the frontlines of the war where they were likely to freeze to death, the Unsullied gave no complaint and even those obliged to stay behind on Dragonstone accepted without question that the island needed to remain secure as a foothold and that the Dothraki camp would need to be kept safe and in some semblance of order until Stormborn returned to them.

            Their final council meeting on Dragonstone was hammering a migraine into Dany’s skull that surprisingly had little to do with the wine she’d drunk with Tyrion and more to do with the simpering and bickering of the councilors.  Missandei was unhappy at the prospect of being parted from Grey Worm indefinitely, Varys was anxious about the cold weather they’d be expected to endure, Tyrion was nervous about the role of the dragons and the safety of them and their mother, Groleo was terrified at the looming beginning of the miracle work he would need to pull off directing three separate armadas, several of which would be breaking into smaller fleets.  They had at last gotten in touch with the White Harbor fleet, who were only a few days behind them to everyone’s relief.  They would need a few days on Dragonstone to stock provisions and load the dragonglass, men, and horses, but they would set sail north only a week after the small Targaryen fleet.  There was no word from the Eastwatch fleet; it seemed that the storms were preventing successful raven travel.

            “We can’t afford to wait!” a frustrated Jon snapped across the table at Tyrion, who had suggested again that the Targaryen fleet simply wait to join with the White Harbor fleet.  “We’ve been over this half a dozen times, one week may mean the difference between the Army of the Dead breaching the Wall and the castles being shored up or between getting the North prepared for winter or allowing smallfolk to starve.  We must get the men and supplies north that we can as soon as possible and as soon as possible is tomorrow.”

            “With respect, Your Grace, those men and those supplies are not yours to command,” Tyrion said, the words brittle in the air.  Dany met his gaze sharply, but he didn’t back down.  “Recent days have been trying for all of us preparing for this voyage, but I ask that you remember who those forces belong to.”

            She felt more than saw Jon’s gaze flicker to her and he shrank slightly in her peripheral vision.  “Of course.  I apologize, Your Grace, for my outburst and thoughtlessness.”

            “You are forgiven,” she answered tightly.  She would have preferred to turn to the balcony and search the skies for her dragons rather than spend another moment focused on her counselors or the damn figurines on the Painted Table showing the dead approaching Eastwatch, but the light of day was sending bolts of pain behind her eyes.  Before anyone else could add more drama to the room, she said slowly to the room at large, “Lord Tyrion is right that we are all under immense pressure.  Groleo, the captains of the ships are fully briefed?”  He nodded.  “Grey Worm, Rahkarro, your men are chosen and poised to depart tomorrow?”  Both warriors nodded.  “King Jon, what dragonglass is ready has been loaded onto the ships?”  He nodded stiffly, obviously carrying a chip on his shoulder from Tyrion’s rebuke.  “Good.  Then we have done our jobs as best as we could have done.  We have less than twelve hours before we depart.  I suggest we spend those hours resting and enjoying our dinners quietly in our rooms.  It may be some time before we have that luxury again.”  She stood and the counselors stood with her.  “Lord Varys, King Jon, I would have words with you both.” 

The rest of the room cleared and Jon bent to talk quietly to Ghost as she approached Varys.  The eunuch buried his powdered hands in his flowing sleeves and nodded in deference to her.  “Your Grace.”

            “Lord Varys.  Have we still had no word from Highgarden?”

            “None, Your Grace.  My little birds reported that Lady Olenna’s caravan passed through Bitterbridge some days past, but I have had no word since.”

            Dany sighed and rubbed her temple.  “At least we know she has made it into the lands of her bannermen.  We must hope now that they have remained loyal to Highgarden in her absence and not fallen in with Cersei.  Keep me informed.”

            Varys bowed.  “Always, Your Grace.”

            The eunuch left them then and scurried from the room as Ghost departed too.  The door fell shut heavily behind them and Jon stood stiffly.  “I sent him to hunt.  It will be some time before he gets another chance.”

            “Good,” she said, coming around the Painted Table to lay one hand on The Bite, just to his right.  “Soon we will be in your lands under your jurisdiction at the mercy of your people.  Tyrion is just nervous for that time.”

            “He has a right to be, but I swear there will be nothing to fear,” he said tightly, turning to face her.  His eyes fell to her hand and he laid his fingers over hers.  “If someone were to threaten you, they’d die before they could draw a bow, no matter who their allegiance is to.  You know that, don’t you?”

            She tilted her head, the warmth of his hand creeping up her flesh and lulling her headache.  “Drogon has been known to burn men for raising a spear to me.  But he is not always so close at hand.”

            Jon twined their fingers together and met her eyes, his jaw set and the darkness in his grey eyes swirling with fierceness.  If she didn’t know better, she might have mistaken that look for Targaryen ferocity.  “I will be close at hand.  I won’t let you so far from me that I couldn’t cut down any man who would harm you.  Not while I live.”

            She squeezed his hand firmly and said, “Nor will I let you too far from me.  When we fight the dead, you will be in the sky with me.  If you fight with Longclaw, then I will guide my dragons to burn your foes or I will be beside you with a sword of my own.  We will not be parted so long as we both live.”

            He took a step closer to her and brushed his thumb along her jaw to her neck, his rough fingers lost in her silver curls.  A shaky breath slipped from her lungs and her nerve endings sparked.  “I love you, Daenerys Targaryen.  And when we win this war and winter fades away, I’m going to marry you.  Then even when we return to the dirt, I’ll be holding onto you.”

            Her eyelids slipped, but she held off the warmth seeping through her enough to hold his gaze, to imprint on her memory the way he looked at her in that moment, like she was his whole world.  “And I love you, Jon Stark.”  She let her eyes fall shut then and kissed him, slow and deep and molten.  His hand found her waist and pressed her to him, the warmth of his arms around her, his mouth on hers, his body pressed into hers, injecting itself into her veins.  She clutched at his shoulder with her free hand, letting the smell of leather and metal and pine wash over her and pull her under.  Jon’s fingers drilled into her lower back and her blood simmered in her heart, running through her arteries and pooling between her legs.  Gods, she wanted him, wanted him inside her, wanted him to take ownership of her and tell her body what he’d already said out loud, that they’d never be parted.

            As if he was thinking the very same thing, Jon’s hands slipped free and found her hips, lifting her up onto the Painted Table as if she weighed nothing, standing between her knees and kissing her harder.  Their mouths molded together and she felt her lips begin to bruise in their forcefulness and need, but she didn’t pull back, grazing his lower lip with her teeth.  Jon pulled her right to the edge of the Table, her breasts pressed to his leathers, the firmness of him tight against her center, just enough to be obvious through their heavy layers of clothing.  “Gods, I want you,” he growled between kisses.

            “So take me,” she moaned, reaching for the clasps of her dress at her hip.  Jon heard the metal clinking and helped her undo the clasps and open her dress, letting her breasts fall free.  “Gods,” he groaned, burying his face in her breasts and kissing them over and over as she swooned.  Dany fell backward onto the Table, scattering the wolves and helmets and unmarked dead men as Jon followed her down with his mouth.  She slid her fingers into his hair, tugging at the curls loose at the nape of his neck to keep his lips on her breasts as she squirmed beneath him, rapidly losing control of her body.  Jon’s hands wandered to her hips again and unlaced her trousers, then shoved them down her legs to the tops of her boots.  Dany struggled to sit upright and help him unclasp his leathers and unlace his trousers, then he was inside her, filling her, forcing her walls apart to take his hardness and his girth, making her cry out in pain and ecstasy.  Jon stroked the side of her face with his fingertips, his mouth taking her as he did with his cock, and then she was tumbling back down on the Table as his hands found her hipbones and held her there as he fucked her, his length ramming into her over and over, hitting her back wall, pushing her to her limit.  Her eyes rolled back behind her lids and her hands went to Jon’s hair again, holding him down over her as his mouth found her right breasts and sucked, the speed with which he split her open not lessening, not weakening.  “Jon…” she moaned.  “Jon, fuck me…yes…”

            He caught her nipple between his teeth and a jolt went up her spine as she gasped and cried out.  “You’re mine,” he growled, his voice low and rough and touching someplace deep in her core that went dark and molten.  “You’re mine, Daenerys.”

            As he lifted himself up once more, she caught him by the shoulder and followed him up, kissing him roughly and tangling their tongues.  When they broke apart to gasp for air, she tugged hard on his curls and said against his mouth, “I’m all yours.  And you’re all mine, Jon, all mine.”

            “Always,” he groaned, his mouth finding hers again as he drilled into her, the Table shuddering under her.  She was quaking to her core and it took all her will to hold onto him and kiss him as he pounded into her, as her muscles clenched around him and pulsed with urgency, as her vision went black and red and her mouth fell open as he kissed her throat, and she screamed his name into the stone room.  Heat filled her and warmed her core and her thighs as he came with her and then she slumped back on the Table, spread out beneath him as they fought for air.

            “I’ll never look at a map of the North the same way again,” Jon said with a wicked grin.  “I’ll never not see you stretched across it naked and writhing under me.”

            Dany met his gaze and couldn’t help grinning back at him when she saw his smile.  “Good.  I’d expect nothing less.”

            Jon shook his head, still grinning, and leaned down to kiss her.


	10. A Wolf in the Sheets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I've been gone for awhile, but I really wanted to figure out a different way for Jon and Dany to arrive in the North, one that was canon-compliant, but different from what others have done. I did some research on the Manderlys to figure this out and I think it paid off. There are still some parts that feel clunky to me, but I'll live with them. And I had to title the chapter this way because I couldn't help it as I was sitting there smirking. ;) I promise to post again soon...the next chapter is all outlined and waiting for me to finish.

            Ghost became short-tempered and grouchy when Jon insisted the white direwolf follow him aboard the ship, but a few hours north of Dragonstone’s shores the wind kicked up and Ghost was standing on the deck beside him, looking out over the dark water and breathing in sharp air that tasted of snow and ice.  They were finally going home and they could feel it in the marrow of their bones.

            He was going home and Dany was coming with him.

            She was as busy a person as he was, busier perhaps, and he saw little of her during the days after the battle with Euron Greyjoy as they prepared to set sail.  Their only time alone together was at night.  But she never left his mind and wherever she was he could feel a tug in his heart that worsened as she moved farther away.  He kept hearing in his head Euron Greyjoy shouting up at her, _“I’ll have your dragons, Daenerys!  I’ll have your dragons under my boot and I’ll fuck you bloody!”_   He would never forget that as long as he lived and he couldn’t stop the nightmares that plagued him ever since.  They were strange, fragmented imaginings of a battle full of images spliced from his memories and fears, images of the dead at Hardhome, the Walkers and the Night King, the bolts of trebuchets arcing past Drogon’s wings, the sound of that fucking horn and the way Viserion had flinched and shaken his head to fight it, an arrow finding Daenerys’s unprotected throat, an icy spear thrust through her chest before his eyes.  And her eyes…he kept seeing her open her eyes and stare at him not with pale violet irises, but with blazing blue ones.

            Not while he lived.

            Trapped on the ship with little to do, he trained with the Unsullied and the Dothraki they travelled with.  The relentlessness of both legions reminded him strongly of the dead, of their manic fury that could not be tempered, and he pushed himself to his limit sparring with men who had been trained not to have limits.  No matter how many times he took a blow to the ribs or was thrown to the deck, he gritted his teeth, found his feet, and kept fighting until his opponent yielded.  The dead had no limits, so neither would he.

            Daenerys spent much of her time cooped up with her councilors, scheming and presiding over a massive and constantly growing spy network that kept the Targaryen council busy with raven scrolls.  When she wasn’t consumed by the Spider’s simpering and Tyrion’s plotting, she was moving among her men, conversing with and advising her captains, encouraging her fighting men, soothing the horses and the dragons.  More than once one or another of the dragons had perched on the ship’s bow and roared a demand that their mother come flying with them and she had always dropped her work and obliged.  Jon went with them, eager to strengthen his bond with Viserion and feel the wind sweeping down from the North all around him.

            At night, he snuck to Dany’s cabin and fucked her until he could forget for a moment that in a few weeks’ time they would be leading the dragons on raids beyond the Wall.  He needed to revel in her soft, beautiful, warm body, to hear her whisper over and over her name for him, _Jon Stark_ , and the fiercely spoken words, _I love you_.  When she inevitably drifted off to sleep, he held her in his arms and soothed his racing heart with imagining a world after winter in which Dany stood by his side, a crowned queen, his wife, with a belly round with child.  She had insisted that such a thing would never come to pass, but he could see how she defined herself as a mother, a mother to dragons, to her people, and to her lost son.  He imagined the way she might smile holding a child in her arms, _their_ child, a Stark and a Targaryen.  He wanted to see that.

            Each day aboard the ship brought raven scrolls from Eastwatch and from Winterfell urging them on.  He trained to give his muscles something to do other than twitch with impatience.  A part of him wanted very much to take Viserion and fly north, to outpace the fleet and get home to his people who needed him so badly.  But he knew Viserion and he knew Dany.  The white dragon would never leave his brothers, not even for a few days, and Dany would not bring the dragons north without the people who stood beside her, who needed her leadership.  The Dothraki might be fierce and the Unsullied disciplined, but what held the Targaryen force together and made it strong was Dany and no one else.

            A sick feeling entered his gut at the unbidden question of what would happen if Daenerys were to fall.  The dragons would rage in their grief and terrorize the country.  The Dothraki would splinter into a hundred different hordes, each led by their own conquering khal.  The Unsullied would be without purpose, perhaps returning to Essos to attempt to regain order in the queenless Bay of Dragons.  And he, Jon, would be shattered again, the way he was shattered after coming back from the dead.

            No.  He would not let her fall.  Failure was not an option.

            The fleet splintered east of The Fingers and they bid farewell to Greyworm and the Unsullied, who continued north to Eastwatch and the Wall.  Eventually, Jon and Dany would join them with the dragons, but not until all their plans were laid at Winterfell.

            Only a few days later, the North loomed on the horizon, gray and rocky.  White Harbor was teeming with activity that could be seen from far away and by the time they entered the harbor, the city was packed full of people, but now most of them were still.  Men lined the docks and the streets, men with mermen emblazoned on their armor, or with direwolves on their gorgets.  Ghost was the first to disembark and wreaked havoc on quivering townspeople as he bolted for open land.  Jon had to resist a sigh as he watched the direwolf vanish.  Then, he looked back to Dany, who was only just holding in a smirk.  She looked every inch the dragon queen with her black dress emblazoned with ruby scales along her upper chest and shoulders, a three-headed dragon pinning her red cloak in place over one shoulder.  The wind whipped at what curls were loose around her face, but she paid it no heed.  She nodded to him and he disembarked the ship, waiting on the docks to offer her a hand as she took her last steps off the gangway.  He released her and led the way up the dock just as one of the men in Manderly armor removed his helmet and stepped forward, bowing low.  “Your Grace.”

            “Ser Wylis,” Jon returned, smiling just a bit.

            Lord Manderly’s oldest and only remaining son straightened.  “It is an honor to receive you, Your Grace, and a blessing to have you returned safely to the North.”

            “It’s good to be back in the North,” Jon answered.  Then he gestured to Dany and she stepped up on his right.  “May I introduce Daenerys Targaryen, Rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Queen of the Bay of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, and Mother of Dragons.”

            Wylis bowed low to Daenerys as well and she bid him rise with a graceful gesture of her hand after only a moment.  “It is an honor to receive you as well, Your Grace,” Ser Wylis said.

            “It is an honor to be received so kindly,” she returned.

            “My lord father awaits you,” Wylis said to Jon.  “Most of our men have already gone up the White Knife, but a small contingent remains to accompany you on your journey.  In the meanwhile, there is much to discuss over bread and wine.  I expect your company is in need of refreshment and rest.”

            “Thank you,” Jon said.  Wylis turned to lead them up to the marina and he and Dany followed, closely trailed by their councilors and Dany’s bloodriders.  He overheard her speaking the guttural Dothraki language to Aggo, who nodded stiffly and in turn spoke to the men who followed him.  He could only assume they had been instructed to travel with the horses to the edge of the city and make camp there.  The Dothraki moved swiftly, eager to have their boots and their horses’ hooves on dry land.

            The streets of White Harbor snaked up the cliffside to where the New Castle stood overlooking the harbor and The Bite.  Men at arms saluted them as they passed and townsfolk either bowed in deference or cried out “The King in the North!”  In his peripheral vision, he watched Dany using all of her charm and gentleness connecting with the smallfolk they passed, bidding quaking women to rise and meet her smile, laughing quietly at the antics of young children, offering a soft hand which she laid upon bony fingers to soothe those who were clearly struggling with the limited winter rations.  She was every inch a queen and every person who met her eyes came to see that too.  A warmth bubbled up inside his chest and he smiled, proud of this magnificent woman who had deemed him worthy of her love.

            Lord Manderly waited for them upon a great turquoise couch in the New Castle’s great hall.  The hall was decorated by beautifully-wrought tapestries depicting images from the Manderly family’s long history, their time as a proud house in the Reach, the war that ultimately sent them north in exile, their acceptance by House Stark and their allegiance to their hosts, the building of New Castle and White Harbor, and their economic success as a teeming sea port.  An ornate rug in turquoise and white lay on the stone floor before Lord Manderly’s couch and a sidebar with a wide selection of wines and ales stood nearby waiting to offer hospitality.  Two great white fireplaces stood to either side of the hall, keeping the stone room warm and dry.  As they entered, Lord Manderly struggled to his feet and sank down onto one knee on the rug, his head bowed in deference as he bellowed, “The King in the North returns!”

            “Lord Manderly,” Jon greeted the rotund man, offering a hand to help him back to his feet.  Lord Manderly smiled warmly at him, his eyes flickering to Daenerys and back so fast they could hardly be noticed.  “I am glad to be back and honored by your reception.  It’s good to be home.”  He extended a hand in Daenerys’s direction and Lord Manderly looked to her for a moment before bowing his head deeply.  “My Lord, this is Her Grace Daenerys Targaryen, Rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Queen of the Bay of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, and Mother of Dragons.  She has generously pledged her support to our cause.”

            Daenerys smiled her glowing, gentle smile and extended a hand to Lord Manderly, which he promptly kissed.  “Well met, My Lord.”

            “It is an honor, Your Grace,” Lord Manderly said, his voice warm and heavy with sincerity.  He released her hand and met her eyes with a smile that crinkled his wide face.  “I cannot express how glad White Harbor and the North are that my King was successful in securing your support.  You could not have come to Westeros at a better time and the North is grateful.”

            “I believe that it is a monarch’s duty to protect their people, Lord Manderly,” Daenerys said, her voice as smooth and regal as it had been when they first met in the hall at Dragonstone.  “King Jon and I have that in common.  As long as the North is threatened, I will be here to defend its people.”

            Lord Manderly bowed his head again, then gestured to the sidebar.  “A drink to celebrate this auspicious alliance?  And you must introduce me to your companions, Your Grace.”

            They made the necessary introductions between Lord Manderly and Ser Wylis and Daenerys’s councilors and bloodriders.  Then, they were directed to a long table before one of the fireplaces and offered comfortable seats and goblets of wine and heavy Northern ale.  Jon was surprised to see Daenerys choose a dark ale and not even flinch at her first sip of it.  Lord Manderly noticed too.  They talked of the dragons, of the preparations for winter, of the gathering of men at Winterfell and the Wall, of the smallfolk and the impact of all these changes upon them.  Lord Manderly made a mild comment about some discontent among the smallfolk that Jon took to be a polite warning that not all the North would offer as warm a welcome to Daenerys and her men as House Manderly.  Tyrion frowned deeply at this and Jon could see that he was not the only one to catch this or be worried by it.

            Plans were made to begin the journey north to Winterfell the next day.  The remaining White Harbor men had been prepared to march two days prior in anticipation of their arrival and, as Daenerys put it, the Dothraki and their horses were eager to stretch their legs after the sea voyage.  Lord Manderly expressed the same feeling he had in two raven scrolls during their travels that sailing up the White Knife would be far quicker than traveling along its banks by foot and hoof, but Jon turned down the advice as he had by raven.  They needed all the seapower they could muster to move Daenerys’s forces to the mainland and it would be good for the Dothraki and their Khaleesi to begin to learn the land of the North.

            Lord Manderly had ordered a humble feast in their honor and they moved to New Castle’s dining room to enjoy it.  Roast pig, beef and bacon pies, ripe red apples, and hearty autumn squashes graced the table, followed by more wine and ale and sweet cream tarts.  It was an unexpected and most welcome surprise after the bland fare aboard the Targaryen ships and one they enjoyed thoroughly with the knowledge that it might be the last feast they partook in for a long while.  Fully sated and drowsy with warmth and wine, the party broke up shortly after dinner and each were led to a small but comfortable room in the towers of New Castle.

            Jon had to wash his face and neck in cool water to wake himself sufficiently before he could attempt to find Daenerys’s chamber.  It was tempting to slip into the soft bed right there in his room, but he could not pass up a night with Daenerys in a bed with walls around them, not when they would be embarking tomorrow on a journey of several days that would involve little comfort or privacy.

            He found Daenerys with less trouble than he’d expected and the Dothraki guards at her door smirked and stepped aside without a word at his approach.  He recalled Daenerys’s words about everyone knowing they were together.  _Rahkarro and Aggo would have expected me to fuck you because that’s what khals do, they fuck whomever they want._   He made a point to bolt the door behind him when he’d entered.

            Daenerys was in a drowsy heap of smooth, pale limbs beneath the furs of her bed, her eyelids at half-mast as she watched him approach.  “It would seem that Northern food agrees with me,” she said, her voice as heavy as her eyelids.  “I haven’t eaten so much in a while, certainly not since we stopped in Pentos on our journey from the Bay of Dragons.”

            Jon couldn’t help grinning and unclasped his fur cloak and then his gorget as he spoke.  “I did notice you take a second helping of the pie.  Perhaps I’ll make a Northerner of you yet.”

            “And never enjoy oranges and red peppers again?  I think not.”  She smiled teasingly and stretched languorously, allowing the furs to slip to her bare waist as if by accident.  The firelight played across her perfect breasts, her dark nipples erect from the chill of the open air. 

            _My mouth is watering.  Fucking hell._   It took him a moment of fumbling with the ties of his jerkin before he could break his gaze away from her and thereby focus on the task at hand.  In his peripheral vision he watched a slow grin creep across Dany’s face, the grin of a predator expecting a fine meal.  He managed to shuck off his jerkin and start on his trousers as he commented, “It looks like not all of you is glad to leave behind the warm weather in Essos.  What are you going to do when we’re at the Wall?”

            “Freeze, probably,” Dany said dryly.  “Unless, of course, I find someone to keep me warm.”

            He shoved off his boots and trousers and watched her gaze fall to his cock.  He could see her pupils dilate and her lips only just part and the sight of her desiring him brought him the rest of the way to being rock-hard.  “Drogon could keep you warm.”

            “Drogon isn’t exactly the affectionate type,” Dany said slowly.  “And besides, he can’t make my blood run hot.”

            Jon’s smile turned crooked and his blood began to simmer at her words.  He took the two steps to the edge of the bed and snaked one hand under the furs to find her ankle.  Dany bit her lip, watching him, and he slowly slid his hand up her calf, past her knee, and up her thigh as she uncrossed her legs.  He paused with his fingertips pressed into her upper thigh and felt her heart racing in her artery as her breaths turned to tiny gasps.  “Your blood is running hot, isn’t it?” he said in that low, dark voice that made her toes curl.  She bit her lower lip again, her violet eyes going dark and molten as she watched him.  Slowly, he tugged the furs down past her waist and crawled up onto the bed, his eyes locked on her gorgeous cunt.  He traced his fingertips along her inner thighs and she sighed and stretched beneath him, wantonly reaching for his touch with her body.  He pulled one leg up over his shoulder and settled down between her legs, brushing barely-there kisses along her legs and hips until her sighs turned to whimpers.  Her skin _was_ growing hot beneath his touch.  He slid one finger deep inside her and watched the way her lips parted and her back arched up off the bed.  “Don’t worry, love.  I’ll keep you warm.”

            She was so warm and wet that on the next slow thrust of his finger, he added a second digit and Daenerys cried out softly.  As he curled his fingers inside her, she whimpered, “Promise?”

            “I promise, love,” he murmured.  He bent his head and kissed her silvery curls, then her soft folds as his fingers pulsed in and out of her.  When he took her clit into his mouth and sucked, Daenerys’s fingers found his hair and tugged hard, pinning him down on her as she moaned and gasped.  His cock was as hard as Valyrian steel and burning the way her skin was and when she whispered in that high, needy voice, “Gods, Jon, please…” he about came undone.  He traced figure-eights over and around her with his tongue and her fingertips dug into his skull.  All of his muscles were quivering with effort as he fought to keep his own release at bay and he could feel her muscles tightening around him as she came close.  Carefully, he pulled his hand free and pressed a soft kiss on her as she groaned in frustration.  “Hang on, love,” he growled.

            “Jon, please…”

            He grinned and slowly pulled himself up her body until his cock lay between her wet folds.  Her gorgeous eyes were squinted shut and her teeth were gritted.  “Hold on, love…”

            “Fuck, Jon…” she hissed.  “Please….”

            “Alright.”  It took almost no effort to slide inside her to the hilt, to feel her heat and desperation all around him, her fingernails clawing his back, pulling him in deeper.  He tried to start and keep an even rhythm, but it was impossible.  She was already too far gone and he was too.  Instead, he rammed into her once, twice, once when her nails dug into the flesh of his ass, and again and again at her bidding, as her body arced up to meet his and pressed him down into her.  When they came, it was together, Dany with her head thrown back screaming and Jon with his teeth clamped down on her left shoulder to stifle his own cries.

            For several minutes, all they could do was lay there gasping for air, tangled up in each other.  Dany’s speech was still a bit slurred when she mumbled to him, “You know, I’ve heard men talk about fucking me being like riding a dragon, but I’ve just been ravaged by a wolf.”

            Jon kissed the shoulder he’d bitten and examined the bite marks remorsefully.  “Sorry, love.  I kept myself from breaking your lovely skin, but that might bruise.  It won’t happen again.”

            Dany grabbed him by the jaw and forced him to look her in the eye two inches away.  She was grinning crookedly, her pupils blown wide by lust and satisfaction.  “Jon Stark, if I didn’t want a wolf in my bed, I wouldn’t have picked you.”


	11. Allies Won and Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am sorry to say that this chapter is far less romantic than some of the prior ones, but there were some plot threads that had to be tied up. The next chapter will start with the company's arrival at Winterfell. If there are certain reunions you want to see or that you think may go a certain way, let me know in the comments!

            She awoke to Jon’s tossing and turning and, as she had during several nights on the ship, laid across his chest to hold him down and soothe him in his sleep.  His nightmares were becoming more frequent and she knew he was sleeping little because of them.  She could see the tiredness in his eyes and could feel his muscles tense with alertness sometimes when she climbed just far enough out of sleep.  She wondered what he dreamed of, but didn’t ask.  He never talked about them, never acknowledged their existence, so she didn’t dare broach the subject.  She knew he’d seen terrible things…there was proof tattooed on his body.  The stab wounds on his chest that would never fully heal, the sliced scars on his face, the burn on his hand.  This man had looked hell in the eyes.  He was entitled to a few nightmares.

            But they were becoming more frequent.  He’d never had them on Dragonstone, at least not that she’d noticed.  Yet in the nine days they spent aboard that ship, he’d awoken her on six nights.  That night in New Castle was the seventh night.

            He twitched and she slid farther across his chest to pin him down tighter.  It had begun at first as a tactic to keep him from flailing and hitting her, but the pressure seemed to soothe him and once had fended off the nightmare entirely, so she kept doing it.  This time, she laid fully across him, her cheek on his collarbone and her hands on his chest as her legs tangled with his.  Her thumb accidentally found the ridge of the scar over his heart and her stomach rolled, but she forced herself to relax.  Jon’s head jerked to the right, then he lay still and, gradually, his breathing levelled out.

            When she could hear dragon wings beating in the air high over New Castle, foretelling the distant rising of the dawn, she woke Jon with a lazy kiss on the lips.  He slipped away from her chamber giving no sign that his sleep had been troubled and she let him go without broaching the subject.

            Missandei came to her not long after Jon’s departure and helped her dress in her riding clothes and her heavy leather cloak.  She refused to wear armor for travel, but Tyrion wouldn’t hear of her going out without at least the protection of her leathers.  In any case, as he’d pointed out, it was a very warm cloak and spending the next several days outside in the Northern mist would chill her to the bone.

            The Manderlys’ kitchen had prepared an early breakfast for everyone of bacon, eggs, and biscuits and Dany ate quickly, eager to get out of the castle and to her khalasar and her dragons.  The Manderlys and some of her council were still preparing to depart the castle when she escaped and went with Rahkarro, Aggo, Jon, and Davos to the western edge of White Harbor where the Dothraki had made camp.  Jon gave her a lingering look as he and Davos broke off to find the Stark men, then he was gone.

            The khalasar was restless and the camp already mostly broken down despite the fact that they were still in the gloomy light of pre-dawn.  The men clasped fists over their chests as she passed, saluting her as “blood of my blood” or “khaleesi.”  Tyrion had had the forethought to have plenty of Northern furs ordered and readied for her khalasar that had evidently been delivered to them yesterday.  She noted many of her men were already outfitted in the furs and cloaks, though some still braved the cold in their skins.  “The men are grateful for your gifts of furs, Khaleesi,” Aggo told her in Dothraki.

            “Good.  I hope when it gets colder none will be too stubborn to use them,” she said, smirking just a bit.  Aggo and Rahkarro smiled at this.  Both were wearing their fur cloaks.

            A joyful screech resounded overhead and she paused to look up and watch the dragons fly over.  Drogon led them, calling to her eagerly, no doubt overjoyed that they were getting on the move and over land now.  _Soon, my love_ , she whispered to Drogon through their bond.  _Within the hour we’ll be off_.

            “Khaleesi!”  Dany turned to Komoro as he approached with three other Dothraki and a cloaked man.  Komoro gestured to the man and said in Dothraki, “This man entered the camp last night.  He says he is your friend.”  The man in the cloak stepped forward and let his hood fall.

            _Jorah._

            Her eyes instantly pricked with tears and a smile stretched across her face as she studied her old friend, searching for some sign of his condition.  But she could only see Jorah Mormont, her great bear, his eyes shining and his smile broad as he sank to his knees before her.  “He is my friend,” she told Komoro, never taking her eyes off Jorah.  Then, she addressed him.  “You look strong.  You found a cure?”

            “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t,” he said, straightening.  “I return to your service, my queen, if you’ll have me.”

            Warmth bubbled up inside her, making her feel strong and joyful and whole.  “It would be my honor,” she said.  Then, without a moment’s hesitation, she stepped forward and embraced him.  For a moment, Jorah seemed stunned into stillness, but then he returned the embrace.  He’d been with her at the beginning when she was a terrified little princess.  He’d defended her and counseled her, had helped her become the queen she was, and now he had come back to her, defying death to serve her.

            She released Jorah, but couldn’t hold back her smile as Komoro and his men dispersed and she, Jorah, Rahkarro, and Aggo continued their walk through the camp.  “We have much to discuss, Ser Jorah,” she said.  “I hope you’ll ride with me in the honor guard?”

            “I would be delighted, Your Grace,” he said, bowing his head.

            It wasn’t long before they were at last on the move.  Dany mounted her silver, much to Drogon’s annoyance, and led the honor guard beside Jon, surrounded by Jorah, Aggo and Rahkarro, Lord Manderly, Ser Willas, and Ser Davos.  Much time was spent on getting Jorah up to speed on events and plans, but he accepted every word that fell from her lips without question.  He and Jon quickly got on well, Jon having known Jorah’s father.  Apparently, Jon’s sword, Longclaw, was even a Mormont sword, though Jorah pointedly commented that he was glad to see his family’s sword honored by being in the hands of a Stark.  Jon seemed to be mildly discomforted by this, but Jorah was clearly sincere and dealt Jon all the respect he’d never dealt to Daario or Tyrion or the other men she’d allowed into her inner circle.  She knew there was a private conversation under the surface she and Jorah ought to have, but for now she was contented by his easy reentry into the fold.

            They followed the White Knife northwest, stopping briefly for a lean lunch that made the Manderly men grumble in disappointment before getting on again at the top speed their supply wagons could keep up with.  Many of the Dothraki split off into scouting parties, ranging beyond the horizon and then turning back to share information about the land with their fellow men.  Dany watched as ravens flew overhead all day, going to and from what she quickly dubbed in her head as the Spymasters’ Wagon, where Tyrion and Varys presided over their growing network of little birds.

            The sun was coming around and descending that afternoon when Dojo rode up to the honor guard at breakneck speed.  “The Spider and the Imp have important news, Khaleesi.”

            She nodded to Jon to let him know to keep the khalasar moving and rode back to the Spymasters’ Wagon, slipping from her silver faster than the driver could stop the wagon.  When she entered, Tyrion offered her a freshly-poured goblet of wine and, without preamble, said, “You’ll want this.  We’ve had news from Highgarden.”

            She took the wine and accepted a seat at the small table they’d covered with maps and raven scrolls as the wagon jerked back to full speed.  “Has Lady Olenna made it there, then?”

            “Yes,” Varys said softly, his face deeply lined and his eyes sad.  “She arrived less than two days ahead of the bulk of the Lannister army.”

            She nearly lost her grip on the wine, but after a moment, took a deep drink of it, then asked, “Is the castle under siege, then?  Can we send men from Dragonstone?”

            “I’m afraid it’s too late, Your Grace,” Varys said.  “The castle fell within hours.  Lady Olenna was executed by Jaime Lannister.  Poison, I’m told, a gentle brew.  Far more mercy than she would have received in King’s Landing, I don’t doubt.”

            It took a few moments to realize that she had stopped breathing.  She took another long sip of the wine, committing to memory the Queen of Thorns.  _Are you a sheep?  No.  You’re a dragon.  Be a dragon._   “A small consolation.  The Reach has fallen, then?”

            “The Tyrells’ bannermen surrendered without a fight.  Lord Randyll Tarley of Horn Hill is the new Warden of the South.”

            Daenerys shut her eyes, choking on the defeat and guilt simmering inside her.  She’d let her allies die.  Before she could utter a word, though, Tyrion said softly, “There was nothing you could have done, Your Grace.  Lady Olenna was travelling with a large guard of her own men, that’s how she made it to Highgarden.  And if we had sent men of our own with her, those would be men and ships we would not have had for the Northern campaign.  Lives have been lost in the war with my sister, but those losses pale in comparison to what we face if we lose the war for the North.”

            She nodded stiffly.  “Thank you.”  She opened her eyes and looked between her two advisors, noting the remaining tension.  “What else?”

            Varys sighed.  “Dorne has broken into civil war.  It is nothing we did not anticipate, but it is nonetheless distressing.  Without a Martell to hold down Sunspear, the country has shattered into a dozen warring nations.  There is nothing we can do now but hope that one of those houses will have the strength to fill the power vacuum before too much blood is spilled.”

            “And that that house will lead a war against Cersei.”

            Varys raised his arms in a shrug.  “That would be the ideal course of events, yes.  With or without Ellaria Sand, the Dornish and the Targaryens have long been allies and whichever house wins would not likely refuse Targaryen support of their claim in return for a Targaryen on the Iron Throne.”

            Dany nodded again.  “Keep a pulse on Dorne.  I want to know every move the Dornish make and if anything does arise that we can do to encourage peace in the region and war against Cersei.”

            The Spider bowed his acquiesance.  “My birds will fly far and wide, Your Grace.”

            She accepted another half a glass of wine from Tyrion, then her blood began to simmer again and she asked through gritted teeth, “Why was I not told that the bulk of the Lannister force was two days behind Olenna?”

            Both spymasters tensed, then Tyrion leaned heavily on the table and answered.  “We didn’t know.  It was the Casterly Rock force that came down from the Westerlands.  We were so concentrated on watching King’s Landing and the army must have marched along a lesser traveled road.  That or there is a little bird out there who found his way into a dungeon at Casterly Rock.”

            Dany couldn’t help a small cringe at the thought.  She knew that many of the little birds were among the homeless across Westeros who were desperate for gold and she hated the idea of someone who had already been through so much misery being subjected to an even worse fate.  She polished off her wine and stood.  “Very well.  I want eyes on this army.  Tell me where it goes next.  We need to catch up to Cersei’s plans before anyone else suffers.”

            “Of course, Your Grace,” Varys said.  “You will be pleased to hear that my birds tell me White Harbor is firmly behind the rightful queen.  Your arrival made a strong and positive impression on the common people and on the Manderly court.”

            Somewhere above the wagon, Drogon roared his displeasure at feeling her emotions still swirling surrounding the news of the Reach and Dorne.  She left her empty goblet on the table and met the gazes of her Hand and her spymaster with the impassive face of a queen.  “I am glad to hear that we have some good news.  I must attend to my children.  It has been too long since I flew with them.”

Both men bowed their heads and bid her goodbye with a quiet “Your Grace.”

            She had scarcely exited the wagon when Drogon came to an abrupt landing on the moor nearby, startling the Dothraki and scattering horses.  Drogon roared at her, or perhaps at the Spider and the Imp, and she hurried to him, climbing up his shoulder without preamble.  They took flight and it was as the icy Northern wind sliced into her lungs like she had swallowed a knife that she realized her eyes and throat were burning.  The cold air froze her tears before they could fall and she gritted her teeth in frustration as Drogon shrieked.  _Be a dragon._   She was a dragon and for all the pain Cersei had wrought on her people, she would have fire and blood.


	12. I Know Some Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. I've been fighting a nasty bout of writer's block that has hopefully eased, possibly helped along by reading "Fire and Blood." I believe this chapter is worth the wait, though, and, if I'm not mistaken, the next one will take us to the Wall.

            Winterfell rose from the snowdrifts and moors like a crouching wolf, the great hall the rise of its back, the towers the sharp edges of its elbows and raised tail, the gate its gaping mouth.  Dany doubted it was intentional, but the vision reminded her strongly of Dragonstone’s draconic shape and the way the great creature that was the castle watched over its domain like a protecting gargoyle.  So was the home of the Starks, the defenders of the North.

            The dragons wheeled in great arcs around and over Winterfell, examining this new landmark with wondering shrieks.  She sent a shadow of a suggestion up to Drogon and Rhaegal that they go hunting in the Wolf’s Wood and they took to it eagerly, their focus shifting instantly.  Viserion followed them like an excited, oversized puppy and the corner of Jon’s mouth quirked watching him go.

            They rode through Winterfell’s gates and into the yard, where three young people waited in the snow: a beautiful and tall girl with flowing fire-red hair, a slight girl with short dark hair and the stance of a warrior, and a dark-haired boy in a wheeled chair.  In the second girl, Dany immediately recognized features that bore a strong resemblance to Jon, the dark hair and small, dark grey eyes, the shape of the nose, the degree of sharpness in the jawline.  From what Jon had told her, these must be his young siblings, Sansa, Arya, and Bran.  Like Jon, they each bore a darkness in their eyes that made them appear almost ageless, as if their souls had matured to such a degree as to bely the age of their bodies.  Close behind Sansa stood a tall, powerfully-built woman in armor befitting a knight and not much further back began a small crowd frozen in awe as they stared at her, Jon, and their entourage.  Jon shifted to dismount his horse and Dany slipped from her own saddle at the same moment.  She had learned long ago that in court games, timing was everything.  Her boots sank into the shallow snow and the hem of her black cloak ghosted over it as she gave the bridle of her horse to her Dothraki groom and watched Jon’s face crack into a wide grin.  He lurched forward and swept up Arya in a fierce hug, then bent to give Bran a more reserved embrace.  As Dany watched the scene, a wave of jealousy washed through her seeing Jon reunited with his family, seeing how his smile was identical in shape to his little sister’s, seeing the weight in the understanding that passed between him and each of his siblings as they greeted each other quietly.

            She heard her council descending to the snow at her back and stepped slowly forward, feeling Jorah’s reassuring presence not far behind.  Jon heard her approach and turned back to extend a hand out to her.  “It is my honor to present her Grace, Daenerys of House Targaryen, Rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Queen of the Bay of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, and Mother of Dragons.  Your Grace, these are my siblings, Sansa Stark, Lady of Winterfell, Arya Stark, and Brandon Stark.”  Each of his siblings offered a half bow to her as their names were spoken and each of them held her gaze as they did it, measuring her.

            “It is an honor to be so received,” Dany said, her regal mask firmly in place.

            “Your Grace,” Sansa said, claiming Dany’s gaze.  “We have made arrangements for you and your council to stay in the south wing and servants will show you to your quarters.  We have prepared a feast for tonight which we humbly hope will offer a pleasant welcome to you as our guest and ally.”

            Dany bowed her head in thanks.  “Your hospitality is most generous and most welcome, Lady Stark.”  She could almost feel Jon’s anxiety building in the air as the warmth of being reunited with his siblings turned into nerves.  A trickle of boldness overtook her and she held Sansa’s gaze as she added, “I hope you have had the chance to prepare for the matter we discussed via raven…I would like to settle that tonight at the feast.”

            If Sansa was surprised at her eagerness to follow through on her promise to Jon, she didn’t show it.  Dany knew little about Jon’s oldest sister, but what she knew and what she saw suggested that they might have more in common than she would have guessed.  “Of course, Your Grace.  We look forward to it.”

            The south wing and the chambers within it were warmer than Dany had expected, though Jon had told her about the hot springs that warmed Winterfell’s walls.  It was still stunning to experience in person.  The chambers Sansa’s men led Dany to were large and richly furnished with heavy pelts adorning the floors and bed to hold in warmth.  A small adjoining room housed a large bathtub filled with steaming water and a third room offered a small bedroom which Missandei claimed upon seeing it in exchange for the separate chamber that had been prepared for her.  “Your Grace will allow me the luxury of keeping your company when I will see you less and less in the wars to come,” she’d said, a brightness in her dark amber eyes that reminded Dany that not all within this castle were their friends.

            With Missandei’s help, she bathed in the hot tub and redressed her hair from her traveling braids to a dramatic swirl of braids piled on her crown with only a few strands of silver-blond curls escaping down her shoulders.  Her gown was Targaryen black with a cloak in Stark grey fastened over one shoulder by her dragon pin.  The grey cloak was a deliberate choice she made out of respect for House Stark and the North.  She wanted to be seen as a queen here, but not as a conqueror.

            Refreshed, Dany and Missandei descended to the great hall together, which they found with little difficulty.  Jon and his siblings were already there talking near the center fireplace and that was where Dany directed herself.  The Starks quieted as they watched her approach and there was a warmth in their eyes that told Dany that Jon had begun to relay the details of their alliance to his siblings…and that they saw those details in a positive light.  “Your Grace,” Sansa said as they bowed their heads to her.

            Almost before Sansa’s eyes had risen to Dany once more, Arya asked, “Did you really get my brother on a dragon?”

            She couldn’t help the instant grin that stretched across her face.  Memories of Jon on dragonback ranked among her most treasured recollections these days, most poignantly Viserion’s adoration for his new friend and the look in Jon’s eyes as they battled Euron Greyjoy and then celebrated the victory afterward.  “He makes a fine dragonrider.  One could mistake him for a Targaryen.”

            Arya smiled and her eyes sparked with mischief, but she said nothing, keeping whatever response she had to herself.  Instead, she looked briefly to Sansa, then back to Dany before saying, “Your Grace, we were just discussing the good news that the Vale will be backing us in the wars to come.”

            Dany’s eyebrows rose in surprise and she shot a quick glance to Jon, who looked at once both proud and terrified.  “That is good news.  How did that come about?  I understood that Lord Baelish and Lord Arryn were undeclared.”

            “Lord Baelish is no more,” Sansa said coolly.  Her expression was carefully mute, but there was a flash of ice in her blue eyes that Dany recognized as fierceness.  Despite all appearances, Dany recognized then that this was a wolf’s den she had stepped into and she felt a newfound admiration for Sansa and her siblings.  “In his quest for power, he forgot that the North remembers.”

            “He betrayed House Stark,” Bran said.  His voice was a disquieting monotone that made Dany pause a moment in confusion.  “And House Arryn.  Lord Royce is Lord Protector of the Vale now.”

            “And Lord Royce is firmly with us,” Arya finished.  Her eyes flicked over Dany as if to measure her up.  Then, she asked, “Is it true that you intend to legitimize Jon tonight?”

            She pretended not to notice Jon’s eyes go to her and then to the floor.  “That is true.  The King of the North was always a Stark in name, after all.”

            Sansa raised an eyebrow, her gaze sharp.  “You recognize him as King?”

            Dany looked to Jon, who met her gaze with no small amount of anxiety.  Despite this being his family home, Jon was anything but relaxed here and, to a degree, it disturbed her.  “He is a king as I am a queen.  Until the end of the Long Night, he and I will fight as equals and, when the time comes, we will unite the Seven Kingdoms again.”

            “The sooner the better on that score.”  From down a nearby corridor, Tyrion followed his echoed words, his brow creased and his eyes on Dany.  As he approached, he explained, “The Lannister army is tearing the Riverlands apart.  So much for one of the river lords filling the Frey vacuum.”

            Venom burned in her veins and Dany gritted her teeth to hold in her frustration and outrage.  Before she could speak, though, Arya snapped, “Damn them!” 

A heartbeat later, Sansa’s eyes were locked with Tyrion’s and she said, “We have men in the Vale that could be dispatched to the border to welcome refugees.  They were not offered any sanctuary during the War of the Five Kings and the realm suffered for it.  I’ll speak to Lord Royce.”

Tyrion nodded and looked to Jon.  “Is there anyone who could be sent to claim the Twins?”

“The Reeds cannot be reached by raven, but Moat Caitlin is occupied by a small garrison,” Jon answered, frowning.  “I fear we’d lose more lives than we’d save by ranging farther south, though.  We need all the men we can gather here in the North.  The Neck will hold.”

“The rightful lord of the Riverlands is Edmure Tully,” Arya said.  “With the Freys gone, if he were to be freed…”

“It is unfortunately not likely that he will be freed in the foreseeable future,” Tyrion said gently, looking down into the fire as he spoke.  “By holding him and his family hostage, my sister has the only viable claim to the Riverlands.  Riverrun is already under her control and, I suspect, the Twins soon will be too.  It’s currently held by the women of House Frey and a small garrison.  I wouldn’t expect it to hold long.”

“Your sister…”

“Is an evil that we cannot face until we defeat the Army of the Dead,” Jon said, cutting off Arya.  She met her brother’s eyes, so like hers, with a ferocity that shocked Dany for the brief moment it was unleashed.  Then, with no more than a shrug, Arya cooled down and nodded in deference to Jon.

“On that score,” Dany said, regaining the floor and looking to Sansa and Jon.  “We had discussed a week or two at Winterfell to get things established before Jon and I go to the Wall.  Do we have a firm timeline?”

“Two weeks,” Jon agreed.  “From the sounds of things, it may take longer for the Dothraki and the Northern folk to adjust to one another than we had hoped.”

“Have there been problems?” Dany asked with a frown.  She had been worried about this from the beginning, but if the Dothraki were already out of hand and she was still with them, there would be massive difficulties once she ranged north.

Sansa rolled her eyes.  “You’ll find, Your Grace, that Northern lords can be quite stubborn and fearful of change.  There have been no incidents, just complaints.”

“My men will prove those complaints to be unfounded,” Dany said, hoping she would be able to follow through on that promise.  “As I assured you via raven, only my most loyal men are with us now and they are the ones who will be leading ranging parties when the rest of the army arrives.”

“Good,” Sansa said.  Her blue eyes crossed the room to Tyrion and locked his gaze.  “You look well, my lord.  Black suits you.”

Tyrion grimaced.  “It suits me far better than red and gold, if that’s what you mean.  You look very well, my lady.”

“It’s been a long road,” Sansa said with the softest smile.  “But perhaps the best is yet to come for both of us.”

Tyrion’s grimace turned into a small smile.  “I hope so.”

“Perhaps the best is yet to come for all of us,” Dany said, looking at Jon.  His eyes met hers and warmed as his lips curved into a soft smile. 

\-------------------------

When the time came for the feast, Jon directed Dany to sit beside him at the head table with his siblings to his right and her council to her left.  The hall was packed with Northern lords, military men, Dothraki bloodriders, and even a few Wildlings.  Dany watched, impressed, as folk from each of these groups made their way to the head table and spoke with Jon, all of whom he addressed with ease.  The anxiety he seemed to have been dealing with earlier was fading as he got back into the routine of things as they proceeded at Winterfell and Dany was glad for it.  Before the night was out, Jon had introduced Dany to members of the Ice River clan, Lord Royce of the Vale, and members of the castle garrison, as well as nearly beating Maghorro in a contest to see who could drink a horn of ale the fastest.  The feast itself was splendid without being impractical.  Roast boar with mushroom sauce, bacon and beef pies, baked apple and pumpkin, and a dessert of lemon cakes graced the table.  The lemons Dany had made sure were brought along from their Essosi supply line when Jon mentioned to her Sansa’s love for lemon cakes.  The sight of the case of lemons earlier that day had been enough to get a true smile and a blush out of Sansa as she thanked Dany.

When the majority of the food had been either eaten or cleared away and the wine and ale were flowing freely, Dany stood and extended a hand to Tyrion beside her, who handed her a scroll with the Targaryen seal on it.  A hush fell over the room and Jon stiffened like a gargoyle as she turned to him.  “Rise, Jon Snow, King in the North,” she said, using the regal voice that she knew the whole room would hear.

Jon stood and turned to face her head-on.  She could tell he was nervous, but he took care not to show it as she held the scroll before her laid across both her palms.  “Today is a day for feasting and for forming friendships, but tomorrow, we go to war.  When the Long Night begins, you and I shall fight as equals.  In recognition of this, I hereby grant upon you by the power of the Iron Throne your legitimacy as Eddard Stark’s blood.” 

Jon accepted the scroll from her and broke the seal, his Stark-grey eyes taking in the words scrawled upon the parchment in her own hand.  Then, he met her gaze once more and she saw tears fighting to break free at the corners of his eyes, which crinkled as he smiled broadly at her.  “Thank you, Your Grace.  It is my honor to accept this token and to fight with you as equals.”

She could feel a slow grin stretching across her face that she chose not to fight.  Let Jon see the pride she felt for him in that moment, let his family and his friends see it.  She would not hide that.  Very deliberately, she reached out to him and took his hand in hers and then, without breaking eye contact with him, she raised his hand in the air and announced to the room, “Jon Stark, the King in the North.”

All around the great hall, men and women from all corners of the world rose to their feet and echoed her words with swords raised.  “Jon Stark, the King in the North!”

The words rang throughout the room half a hundred times, a thing for which Dany was grateful as she let Jon’s hand drop, as she felt the swelling warmth of pride and love flow through her, as she stared up into the swimming grey eyes of this king.  She never wanted to forget this moment and, with the words echoing in her ears and Jon’s eyes locked on hers, only on hers, she was able to fix that moment into her memory like carving it in stone.

Late into the evening they remained in the great hall with their friends and supporters, watching with growing confidence as bonds were forged between men that in other circumstances may have fought to the death.  Three Dothraki joked in jumbled Common Tongue with an Umber, two Glovers, and a Mormont for much of the night, eventually descending into a riotous drinking game.  Jorah and his niece Lyanna Mormont talked quietly together by one of the fireplaces for hours.  A small group of Wildlings started up a band that over the course of the night came to include a strings player from the Gift, a flautist from White Harbor, and a horn player from Widow’s Watch.  Throughout the night, Dany sipped at the strong Northern ale she had found a taste for in White Harbor and tried to focus on watching the room and maintaining conversation with the Starks and with her council, but it was a battle.  Jon was a true king tonight, his confidence inflated to where it should be since his legitimization, his cares temporarily forgotten.  She heard him laugh as she never had before and saw the smile rarely leave his face.  Ghost even found the confidence to leave his side and roam the room without cares, making friends with anyone who would offer a scrap or a bone to chew on.  Jon seemed taller, stronger, more powerful, sexier.  Her skin buzzed with attraction for this man, just as it had when he’d argued with her in the Room of the Painted Table, as it had when she watched him battle on dragonback, as it had, she admitted now, when she looked across the throne room at him when they first met at Dragonstone.  And every time his hand found hers under the table or their knees bumped together, that buzzing condensed into hot liquid seeping through her veins and pooling at her center.

At last, she found she could bear it no more and stood to turn in for the night.  As she stood, she had to fight to hide her shock as the entire room quieted and stood with her, as they would naturally for their queen.  Jon, standing, turned to her with a triumphant smile and took her hand in his to kiss.  His eyes found hers and were a smoldering black that told her she would have little time to herself in her chambers before he followed her there.  “Your Grace,” he said in that husky voice she loved.

She nodded to him and departed to the side hall with Missandei close behind her, pretending to ignore the scores of people standing out of respect for her as she left.  When she and Missandei had found a corridor to themselves well beyond the sight and hearing of the great hall, Dany stopped and leaned against the warm stone wall, grinning.  Missandei stopped as well and looked to her with a matching grin, then began to laugh softly.  “And we thought you would need armor!” she said between laughs.

“Be careful!” Dany hissed, her grin only expanding.  “You’ll curse it.”

Missandei took her hand and squeezed it, then her eyes turned mischievous as she tugged on her fingers.  “Come, Your Grace.  King Stark won’t be far behind us.”

Dany had enough time to strip her dress away and put on her dressing robe.  Missandei was still halfway through unpinning her hair when a knock sounded at the door.  They couldn’t help a quiet giggle and Dany took over on the pins as Missandei answered the door.  “Your Grace,” she said, bowing her head to Jon.

“Missandei,” Jon said, caught a little off-guard.  “I apologize…”

“Come in, Jon,” Dany said with a smile, eyeing him in the looking glass.  Jon caught her eyes on him and forgot his propriety, smiling and shutting the door behind him as Missandei returned to her task.  He was in Stark grey tonight with his gleaming steel gorget and a white cloak that set off his shock of black hair.  Jon stared at her half-down braids as he approached and asked softly, “May I?”

Missandei smiled and looked between Jon and Dany, her hands stilling on a braid.  “Of course, Your Grace.”  With a knowing smirk, she bowed to them both as she retreated and disappeared into her own room.

Jon stepped up to his task and, with deft fingers, began to unbraid her hair, carefully feeling for pins and removing them as he found them.  “I don’t know what I like better, your hair up and perfect or down and a mess.”

Dany smiled as his hand slipped down the length of one lock, brushing over her right breast.  Gooseflesh followed the touch beneath her silk robe.  “I think what happens between the two is what you like best.”

Jon’s smile turned into a crooked smirk, but he didn’t reply, focusing his attention on the many pins holding together the central rings of her braids.  As he found the last of the pins and slowly released her braids, he bent and kissed the exposed side of her neck.  Her eyelids slid closed at the warm pressure of his kiss and she couldn’t help a sigh as one kiss turned into half a dozen down her neck from her ear to her collarbone.  “You were a true king tonight,” she said softly.

His lips stilled on her collarbone and his breath warmed her skin as he whispered, “You made me one.”  She took a breath to argue with him, but he spoke again before she could.  “Not with that scroll, though I’ll be grateful for that until I lie in the crypts beneath Winterfell.  It was your love and your son’s love that helped me find myself.”

She remembered that mental conversation with Drogon and smiled.  Warmth pulsed in her veins and she stood slowly, her hands finding his hips as she walked him back to the bed.  Jon sat and she began to slowly unclasp his gorget, his cloak, his leathers.  “Nonetheless, I think you deserve the respect due a king tonight,” she said, her voice low and smooth, as she watched his eyes go dark and his lips part.

He let her strip him down to his tunic and his trousers, his hands wandering to her shoulders, her hair, her breasts hidden beneath her robe, her waist.  When she bent to remove his boots, she lowered herself to her knees and met his eyes as she tossed both boots aside, then began to unlace his trousers.

“Dany…” he whispered in what was more a rasp than anything else.  She smiled at him, slow and crooked, then took him in hand.  He was already hard from her teasing and she clasped him in both hands and began to stroke him as she leaned in to kiss his tip.  He groaned and the corner of her mouth tipped upward in a sly grin.  She had never done this for a man, but she had been given instructions by Doreah a lifetime ago and she remembered them now as she held her king’s gaze and kissed his member again, her tongue flicking out to tease him and taste the drops of come on his head.  He tasted of salt and very faintly of ale, all man, all northerner.  Jon groaned again and his fingers brushed her hair back from her face, then stroked her cheek.  Her eyelids drooped at the attention, but she bent to her task, parting her lips and closing them around him.  Jon jerked beneath her, his hand twining into her hair reflexively as she sucked on his head, very slowly pulling free, allowing her breath to linger on him a moment, then taking him in again, deeper this time.  A soft moan escaped Jon’s lips as she sucked, pulling him in deeper with her mouth, then she slowly backed off him, her tongue trailing along his member as she did it.  “Dany…gods….”  She circled her tongue around her head, then licked up the drops of come that had formed on him.  She had not expected to enjoy this, but she did.  She loved the way she could feel him wanting her, loved the way she could make him respond to her and the way she could show her love through pleasure.  She curled her fingers around the base of him only and pulled him deep into her mouth.  She breathed him in, opening her throat to him as she took him as deep as she could, then pulled back and forward again, her lips tight around his cock, in and out.  Jon’s hand in her hair found the nape of her neck and moved with her, urging her on.  He was too long for her, but her hands on his base moved with her mouth, stroking him as she sucked.  Jon groaned once more and the words came with his breath, “Love, I’m going to come.”  She smiled and then tightened her lips around him, taking him in deep one last time, and then backing off, her tongue dancing around him.  He did come, his seed hot and thick and salty in her mouth as she drank him in.  She didn’t expect to like that either, but she found herself reveling in feeling him come so viscerally, in the satisfaction that she had given him that, and she realized that she was hot and wet with desire for him.

            When it was done, she pulled herself free with a final kiss on his cock, then watched with a smile as he fell back on the bed, utterly drained.  “Gods, love…” he moaned.  “I’ll dream about that until the day I die.”

            Dany raised herself to her feet once more and went to the sideboard for a glass of wine, her eyes locked on Jon the entire time.  He was sprawled back on the bed, his arms spread eagle and his black curls in a mess around his face, which was clear of everything but satisfaction and drowsiness as he watched her through hooded eyes.  “Hopefully death will be a long way off and you won’t have to dream about it so much as live it,” she said with a teasing smile.

            “Gods, I hope so.  Come here, love.”

            She smiled and took a last sip of wine, then crawled onto the bed beside him, curling into his side like a cat.  His body radiated heat and she reveled in the feel of his muscles wrapped around her, powerful from thousands of hours with Longclaw.  Jon kissed her forehead, then whispered to her, “Now I definitely feel like a king.”

            “Good.”

            Slowly, his fingers trailed from her arm down between her breasts, parting her robe as they trailed down to where her legs were crossed, then slid down between her slick folds.  “And I know exactly how I’m going to repay my queen,” he said, his voice low and rough.

            “Mmm…really?” she whimpered, her eyes rolling back and her legs parting entirely of their own volition.

            “Mmhmm.”  His middle finger found her clit as if automatically and began drawing circles around her nerve endings, then placing pressure directly on her as he moved.  Her muscles tightened and she bit down on her lower lip as a moan escaped her.  His thumb took over for his middle finger and then one finger slid deep inside her, curling around to press the same circles his thumb did inside her, pinching her.  Her knees bent up and her back arched against the bed as shots of pleasure racked her.  “Gods, Jon…” she cried out softly.  White hot pleasure rippled up her spine, along her nerves to her curling toes, up to the ends of her fingernails and the base of her skull.  He didn’t let up and she felt a scream bubble in her throat as her entire body tightened like a bowstring.  “Oh fuck, Jon, please…oh please….”  Then his fingers began to move in perfectly concentric circles and her eyelids tightened so she saw white as her muscles clenched and pulsed and exploded inside her.

            It was as she came down what seemed like minutes later that she felt Jon’s hand leave her lips and she looked at him through hooded eyes.  He was smirking, his dark grey eyes sparking with mischief.  “Sorry, love.  I would hate to ruin Missandei’s sleep entirely.”

            She couldn’t help a soft chuckle and dragged her limp body onto his chest to kiss him.  “Where did that come, Jon Stark?” she whispered against his lips.

            “I expect a similar place to your _skills_ ,” he answered with a low chuckle.  “I may know nothing most of the time, but I know some things, love.”

            “Indeed,” she moaned.


	13. Blood of my Blood

            The days slid by like a slow-moving river, like the White Knife swollen with chunks of ice.  Dany spent her time divided between her council and her bloodriders, presiding over her spy network and riding with her men as they mapped the land around Winterfell. 

            Dorne was in chaos.  Instead of one replacement for the Martells stepping forward, half a dozen families were vying for Sunspear, engaging in a bloody civil war.  The Yronwoods were currently closest to claiming power, but they’d lost hundreds of men in battle against the Wyls and the Blackmonts were closing in on them while the Vaiths laid siege to Sunspear itself.  Smaller houses had taken to the mountains, either fleeing up the Prince’s Pass or banding together in splintered armies.  The Dornish didn’t seem to realize it yet, but the Reach was well aware that they were coming and preparing to hold the pass against them, denying safety to their old enemies who were now refugees.  Daenerys wanted to get on Drogon and fly for Dorne at once to establish peace and order, but she remembered very well her brother’s stories of their family’s history.  The Targaryens and the Martells may have been recent allies, but that had not been the case for most of her family’s time in Westeros.  It had not been so long since Rhaenys had fallen from Maraexes and died in Dorne.  If she could spare her Unsullied to take Sunspear and her Dothraki to root out rebels in the mountains, she could take Dorne and establish peace.  But she could not spare a single soul, including her own and those of her dragons, who could be shot down without ground support.

            Meanwhile, the Twins fell to the Lannister army.  If Varys’s little birds were to be believed, the women of House Frey had died upon Lannister swords and their bodies had been tossed into the river.  An up-jumped Payne had been awarded the castles and they were garrisoned by five hundred men, lest the Northerners think of marching south.  Daenerys seethed at this news as well and considered flying south to melt the Twins into a bridge and be done with it.  Again, though, there was no point to flying south when she could not spare men to march with her.  They had to defeat the dead first.  Only then would they be free to take back the country from Cersei.

            To soothe her frustrated soul, she rode hard atop her silver with Rahkarro, Aggo, Komorro, and half a dozen other captains in turn, leading ranging parties that were as much scouting ventures as they were public relations endeavors.  Whenever they came upon a village or a keep, Daenerys would insist they dismount and greet the people.  They were met with wariness and fear, which she fought to dispel by giving gifts of furs, food and dragonglass weapons that the people would need as winter came.  She would tell them what they were facing and what she planned to do about it.  She also had her Dothraki see to the local horses and soothed sick children herself.  By the time they left, they would have new friends who knew to welcome any Dothraki who ventured onto their lands.

            Jon hated that she led the ranging parties.  He hated having her so far away from him, sometimes for two or three days at a time, and he hated the thought of the danger she put herself in by leaving herself so exposed in the Northern wilderness.  She wore her armor and helm to placate him, but removed the helm immediately when they came upon smallfolk to greet them face-to-face.  Jorah always rode at her side, quietly scanning the land for any would-be challengers.  She trusted him to keep her safe and, grudgingly, Jon did too.

            “He’s in love with you,” Jon had pointed out to her once when she’d insisted Jorah would keep her safe.

            “And?” she’d countered.  “I’m not about to encourage him if that’s what you’re afraid of and any feelings he has for me make him a better defender.  If you can’t be at my side, wouldn’t you want someone there who cares for me as you do?”

            He had agreed with her on that score, but resented it terribly and held a grudge over it for several days.  She had forgotten how grim he’d been when they first met and was reminded in those days when she saw him only at dinner or in bed, his brow scrunched downward, his mouth tight, his jaw like stone.  She didn’t like fighting with him, but she had to do what she had to do to smooth things over between the Northerners and the Dothraki.  That was, after all, the main reason they were at Winterfell and not the Wall.

            One morning, they ranged east across the White Knife and towards the Dreadfort, which still stood lordless on account of the North having so few lords left.  They stopped at a farm they regularly visited to drop off a small bag of grain, then went on to a small hamlet at the edge of a woods to see the people there, who were training with spears and dragonglass daggers they’d provided.  The morning air was brisk and sharp, Northern air as she’d come to know it, but the sun was warm on her armor as she, Jorah, Komorro, and their troop of twenty Dothraki crested the hill.  As the hamlet and the woods beyond came into sight, Dany leaned into her silver to urge her on.  As they galloped faster, something whistled over her shoulder and Dany whirled her head, her braid flying in the wind as she looked in the direction the projectile had gone.  _Was that an arrow?_

            _Ka-chunk!_

            Red-hot paid sliced up her neck and along her collarbone.  Her silver bucked and her legs tightened around her reflexively just as her hands tightened on the reins, holding herself ahorse even as her muscles seized and burned.  In a flash, she once again watched Drogo fall limp from his horse.  _The Dothraki follow only strength._ “Khaleesi!” Jorah screamed beside her.

            Her bloodriders broke formation and swirled around her, their horses galloping in mad circles around her to take any more arrows which would fly.  One fixed itself in Komorro’s thigh and he cried out a curse in Dothraki.  She raised a fist in the air and pointed it towards the woods.  “After the archer!” she roared in Dothraki.  Her throat burned with the words and the pain and she refused to believe that the warm wetness under her armor was blood.  Her Dothraki broke ranks and raced to the edge of the woods, bows and arakhs drawn and ready, howling and screaming like demons.

            “Khaleesi!”  She looked to Jorah and saw his eyes locked on her shoulder, but she refused to follow them.  _If I look back, I am lost._   Gritting her teeth so they ached, she reached up and took the shaft of the arrow in her gloved hand.  Pain arced along her nerve endings at a mere touch, but she could feel that the shaft ended in a flame-hardened tip, not in a metal arrowhead.  _The Dothraki follow only strength._   Without a moment’s hesitation, she gripped the shaft and, in one jerk, wrenched it from where it had lodged above her collarbone, under the edge of her gorget.  Her eyes tightened and her throat burned with a scream that she only just kept bottled up.  Then, she held the arrow between her fingers and tightened her other hand on the reins.  Jorah was staring at her in horror and amazement when she opened her eyes.  “Come on!” she said.  “We have an archer to hunt down.”

            With nothing more, she gave her silver a soft kick and led the charge after her Dothraki.

            They found Komorro and his men at the edge of the hamlet with a crowd of onlookers, an old man with a bow kneeling at their feet.  Komorro grabbed the man by the hair and threw him to the ground, sending the bow skittering across the dirt.  “You would kill my Khaleesi, you traitor?!” he howled down at the man in Dothraki.

            Dany slid easily from her silver’s back, her wound forgotten.  “Komorro!” she called, stilling her bloodrider.  In a moment, her eyes flicked around, catching the murderous glares of her Dothraki, the mixture of anger and fear among the smallfolk.  She stepped to the man and leaned down towards him, still holding the arrow.  “Is this your arrow?” she asked coolly.  “I found it lodged in my armor.”

            The man looked up at her through slitted eyes, his pupils narrow with hate.  He spat on the ground at her feet.  “That’s where it belongs, Targaryen whore.”

            Komorro made to lunge for the man, but before he could, she lashed out and buried the arrow in the man’s shoulder, just where he’d buried it in her.  The old man cried out in agony and fell to the ground in a heap, clutching at the wound.  She scowled at him.  “You scream like a little girl.  Is that what you thought you’d hear when you shot me?”

            The man peered up at her once more, then spat through gritted teeth, “You bitch.”

            She bent down to glare right back at him, but kept her voice loud enough to be heard by all.  She wanted this coward to burn, but she knew that wasn’t the way to handle this.  “Whatever your feelings about me, your king ordered that no harm come to me or my men by Northern hands.  You disobeyed his orders and tried to kill me.  We’ll see how he decides to deal with your treason.”

            She sent a rider back to Winterfell and one of the women of the village was putting the final touches on her stitches when Jon arrived, his horse moving at full throttle.  Dany watched through the window as he slid from his horse like a Dothraki and pushed past Jorah, who was guarding the door of the house she’d been brought to.  Upon his entrance, the woman, Katerin, froze and looked up in fear at Jon’s ferocious expression.  “My king,” she whimpered.

            Jon’s eyes flashed from Dany’s eyes to Katerin, then to the closing wound above Dany’s collarbone where her tunic had been pulled back to allow Katerin to work.  “Are you alright?” he asked hoarsely.

            “Fine,” Dany said.  “Pulled the arrow out myself.”

            Jon hissed through clenched teeth.  “Good.  Where is he?”

            “Aqhorro and Jaro are guarding him.  Leave him be until I’m finished here.”

            Jon looked ready to break through a wall to get to the archer, but after a moment’s hesitation, he nodded stiffly and sat on a nearby stool.  Katerin returned to her work with shaking hands and Dany thanked the gods that she had already finished the last stitch and was just tying it off.  “I told you these ranges were far too dangerous,” Jon said coldly.

            Dany raised an eyebrow at him, her blood warming with anger.  “I’m fine.  Besides, it was bound to happen and now we can make an example of him.  Everyone else here is loyal to me.”

            “It is true, Your Grace,” Katerin said softly, her eyes on the wound as she cleaned it again.  “The people here love their Queen.  Josef is an angry drunk and a fool.  He lost his sons fighting against…King Aerys.”

            Dany’s eyes flashed to Katerin’s, but the older woman didn’t lift her gaze.  “I’m not my father,” she said gently.

            Katerin looked to her then and smiled.  “Of course not, Your Grace.”  Without another word, she bandaged the wound and helped Dany back into her armor, Jon watching the whole time with an iron jaw.

            When they went out into the little square, Aqhorro and Jaro were waiting with Josef on his knees between them and an arakh at his throat.  Komorro was atop his horse, a bandage around his leg where there had been an arrow some hours past.  All of her Dothraki bore scowls, as did the villagers.  When she stepped into the center of the square, standing straight and tall despite the weight of her armor, cheers of “Khaleesi!” and “Queen Daenerys!” rang out.  She smiled and held up a hand for quiet. 

Then, Jon squeezed the hand at her side and walked up to Josef.  He was quivering with anger and vengeance, his grey eyes dancing with fire and blood.  “Josef.  I gave a direct order to all the North that no harm come to Queen Daenerys or her people.  Did you make an attempt on her life?”

The man glared up at Jon.  “My sons died fighting her father, _my king_.  I won’t see my home fall into the hands of a Targaryen whore.”

“To speak that way and to raise your bow to your queen is treason,” Jon ground out.

Josef spat on the ground.  “Fuck the queen.”

Jon growled and nodded to Komorro, who gave directions to his men in Dothraki.  They hauled Josef forward to a fence and threw him across it, pinning his hands at his sides.  The arrow was still in his shoulder and he cried out as his chest slammed into the fence.  Jon walked purposefully around the fence, drawing Longclaw as he did so.  The hamlet held its breath as they looked on, as Jon stepped up to Josef’s side and held Longclaw low with its tip in the dirt.  “Josef.  You stand accused of treason, the penalty for which is death.  Do you have any last words?”

Josef looked up at Jon and Dany saw the glimmer of hate in his eyes as he said the words, “You’re no king, just a bastard being used by a foreign whore.”

There was a shocked intake of breath from around them, then Jon hoisted Longclaw high and, in one fluid motion, took Josef’s head from his shoulders, cleaving the arrow shaft in two as he did it.  Dany’s breath caught in her throat and she stared as the blood spurted and poured from the wound where Josef’s neck had been.  She didn’t know what to feel, but the numb horror she felt wasn’t what she’d expected.

Slowly, wearily, Jon turned to the small crowd and sheathed Longclaw.  “Queen Daenerys is here to protect us from the evil beyond the Wall.  Her Dothraki are here to stand between us and whatever enemies come from beyond the Wall or from the south where Cersei Lannister rules as a madwoman.  She is as much your queen as I am your king and I’ll stand for no harm or disrespect to her.  Tell everyone what happened here…tell them that your kind-hearted queen took an arrow bravely and that her would-be slayer found justice at my own hand.”

There was a moment of quiet, then Katerin raised a fist and called out, “The King in the North!”

In a chorus, the hamlet echoed her words and Dany watched Jon bow his head and turn, stalking back to his horse.

They rode back to Winterfell in utter silence and, when Jon dismounted, he disappeared through the door to what Dany had been told were the crypts of Winterfell.  She choked on her disappointment that this would remain unsettled between them for now when all she really wanted was to be held by him.  She refused to admit it to anyone else, but she was in a lot of physical pain and, now she had a chance to think about it, she was frightened by what had happened.  If that arrow had struck and slid up her gorget instead of beneath it, it would have gone through her throat and killed her.  She would have choked on her own blood, miles from her beloved dragons, miles from Jon.  The prospect terrified her and she kept thinking about all the things she would not have had the chance to say or do, all the time she would have lost that could have been spent with Jon, with her dragons, with her people.  It made her sick.

She was pondering all this sitting by the fire in her chamber when there was a knock at the door.  An overprotective Missandei answered it and, with trepidation, turned to Dany.  “My Queen.  There has been a raven from the Citadel.”

Dany frowned deeply and accepted the raven scroll, frowning deeply.  “The Citadel?”  She broke the seal and unrolled the scroll as Missandei bolted the door.  What she read rocked her to her core.

_To Queen Daenerys of House Targaryen,_

_I apologize for the forwardness of writing directly to you, but I thought you should know as soon as possible.  Jon asked me to research dragonriding and I have done so.  According to my findings, it is impossible for someone without Valyrian blood to get close to a dragon, much less ride one.  Furthermore, the communications Jon described that he’s had with Viserion suggest a very strong affinity to the dragon, one which should be impossible for a Stark.  I don’t know who Jon’s mother was, but I cannot doubt that he is your blood.  There is too much evidence which I cannot ignore._

_Your servant,_

_Samwell Tarley_

Dany blindly handed the scroll to Missandei and stood to pace in front of the fire.  _Blood of my blood._   Jon was part Targaryen.  He had to be and this was proof.  Proof that his relationship with Viserion was no coincidence.  Proof that the ferocity she’d sometimes seen in his eyes had age-old roots.  Proof that her lover was of her blood, the way so many Targaryen couples had been.

She wasn’t alone.  She had _family._

“I need to speak to Jon.”

Missandei squeezed her hand, then released her.  “He’s still in the crypts.”

Dany nodded numbly, then took the scroll back and exited the chamber.

The crypts were frigid and dark, the air stale and cold.  It was a place for the dead, not the living, but the warm light of the torches led her easily to Jon, who sat at the base of his father’s tomb, tending to Longclaw with a whetstone.  She paused beside a statue of a woman who looked remarkably liked Arya and said softly, “Jon.”

He stilled and sighed, then looked up at her, his dark grey eyes swirling.  “Whatever it is, can it wait?  I can’t take much more today.”

Her eyes pricked with unshed tears at the weariness in his voice, the pain in his eyes.  He’d needed to kill that man, a part of him had wanted to do it, but when it came down to it, he hated killing.  She couldn’t help but think of the stories Ser Barristan had told her.  _Rhaegar never liked killing._   But she needed to tell him this, needed to talk to him about this.  “We can talk about what happened today another time if you wish, but there’s something you need to know.  There was a raven from the Citadel.”

Jon frowned deeply and his eyes lit on the scroll in her hand.  She held it out to him and he took it without touching her fingers.  His eyes moved quickly over the words, then he set the scroll aside, staring down at the sword across his knee.  “Jon,” she said softly, as if she could wake the dead by speaking with too little caution.  “You’re my family.”

He looked up sharply and met her gaze, his eyes molten steel with half a hundred emotions playing through them.  “Dany…if we’re family, then what about…?”

In a moment, she was on her knees before him, her hands clasped around his.  She would not see him uncomfortable with this, would not let him find any reason to walk away from this.  “Jon, I don’t know how we’re related, but my family has wed cousins and siblings for centuries.  I would have wed my brother Viserys if he hadn’t chosen to sell me to Khal Drogo.”

He frowned deeply and squeezed her hands.  “This doesn’t bother you, then?”

“Bother me?”  Her eyebrows shot up and her heart skipped over its own beat.  “Jon, I have been so alone for so long.  All I ever wanted was a family who loved me.  Having you for my blood is more than I could have ever hoped for.”

He shut his eyes and bent his head over their hands, then kissed her knuckles.  “Love, I need to know the truth.  I need to know who she was.  I can’t believe my father would…the only Targaryen woman at the time would have been your mother.”

“It can’t have been her.  She fled to Dragonstone.”

Jon’s brow creased.  “Then who?  The nameless daughter of some Targaryen bastard?”

Dany frowned and her mind began to move slowly, like gears grinding over one another.  There was something at the edge of her mind.  “Maybe.”  Then, she looked to the statue of the woman on impulse.  “Jon…who is she?”

Jon followed her gaze and, after a confused moment, said, “My aunt Lyanna.  Why?”

In a flash, she saw again how much Jon resembled Arya.  And then how much Arya resembled that statue.

_“He brought me home to Winterfell with him at the end of Robert’s Rebellion….It was his sister who Rhaegar kidnapped, his sister whose body he brought home to bury, but when he saw the Lannisters lay your niece and nephew at Robert’s feet he couldn’t get north fast enough.”_

            Dany froze stock-still and her eyesight went foggy as her mind travelled backwards to a different time.  Dimly, she could hear Jon say her name, but it was as if from underwater.  He had Stark looks and Valyrian blood…there were only so many people who carried Valyrian blood…and only so many people who carried Stark looks.  “What if Ned Stark wasn’t your father?” she whispered to him.

            She could hear her heart pounding in her head as she waited for him to answer.  “What?”

            It took two hard blinks to find her sight again and meet his troubled gaze.  “Jon…what if we’ve been thinking about this backwards?  What if the Stark in you is from your mother, not your father?”

            His face creased into a dozen canyons.  “What do you mean?”

            _Seven fucking hells…could it be?_ She took a deep breath, then said, “Ned Stark wasn’t a man to visit brothels and yet he returned from Robert’s Rebellion with a baby.  He also returned with his sister’s body…his Stark sister who had spent the war with my brother, Rhaegar.”

            For a moment, Jon’s eyes flickered around the crypts as if he was unconsciously looking for an exit.  Then he dropped Longclaw with a clatter as his head swam.  “No…no, it can’t be…”

            “It makes sense!” she insisted.  “You and Arya share so many features and she looks just like Lyanna!  And the way you connect with the dragons…and your personality matches up with what people have told me about Rhaegar.  A warrior who hates killing, a quiet soul.”

            “He kidnapped her…” Jon groaned into their clasped hands.  “He raped her and let her die.”

            “What if he didn’t?” Dany said sharply, wrenching her hands free and gripping him by the shoulders so he met her gaze.  “Everything I’ve been told about Rhaegar from men who knew him tells me he was kind and gentle-hearted.  What if he and Lyanna were young fools and they ran off to elope where his wife and her betrothed couldn’t stop them?  What if things got out of control and before they could dispel the rumors the Starks were marching south?  What if Rhaegar left his pregnant lover in Dorne when he went to meet Robert at the Trident and what if Ned Stark made it to Dorne in time to say goodbye as his sister died and asked him to keep her son safe from Robert and the Lannisters?  You said yourself that when he saw what they did to Rhaenys and Aegon he couldn’t get north fast enough.”

            Jon shook his head slowly, his face parchment white like he might be sick at any moment.  “If that’s true, that would make me your…nephew?”

            The breath left her lungs in a rush and she had to whisper her response.  “And the heir to the Iron Throne.”

            Jon shook his head wildly now.  “No.  Even if it is true, I’m still a bastard and I don’t want the damned thing.  The Iron Throne is yours, Dany, it will always be yours.”

            “Then we’re family,” she whispered, her voice hushed with significance.  “Jon, we were meant to be together.  We both should have died as babies, but we lived and we defied death and found each other.  We were meant for this.”

            “Maybe,” he said hoarsely.

            “Not maybe.”  She leaned in and kissed him fiercely.  She expected him to stiffen or to jerk away, but he didn’t.  He was kissing her back, his breath in her mouth as she sucked his lower lip, his tongue dancing with hers when he let her into his mouth, his fingers twining into her hair, holding her close.  Their breaths came short and fast and Dany buried her hands in the curls at the nape of his neck, bending his neck to draw him closer.  She carefully shifted around Longclaw and knelt between his legs to get closer to him, losing herself in his arms, in his touch, in his kiss.  When she had to break away to breathe, she gasped, “We were made for each other, Jon Stark.”

            “Gods,” Jon groaned.  “I’m not even a Stark.”

            “Yes, you are,” she growled fiercely, outraged at the mere thought.  “You are a Stark to me and you always will be.  You were born by a Stark, raised by a Stark.  You have my brother in you, but you have just as much of Eddard Stark and nothing can take that from you.”

            Jon stared at her for a moment, his eyes swimming with unshed tears, then he kissed her again.  “I love you,” he whispered between kisses.

            “I love you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shameless plug: Part of the reason I've been slow to update this fic is that I've been working on another one. If you're a Severus Snape fan, check out "Alchemy" here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17782529?view_full_work=true  
> If you miss me, I promise I plan to update again soon. In the meantime, check out my Jenny of Oldstones one-shot here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18690985


	14. Bonding with Arya

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a short chapter, but I felt the need to give you guys something to enjoy after the disaster 8x5 was. I feel so betrayed by D&D, who have completely upended Daenerys's character arc. At least "Winds of Winter" will be different and, I'm sure, far better. In the meantime, there's fanfiction.

            They were set to leave for the Wall tomorrow and Jon was ready.  Shipments of food were arriving from across the North daily, along with Northern refugees who were being settled in Wintertown.  They’d received word that Grey Worm and the first group of Unsullied had arrived at Eastwatch and that the Eastwatch and White Harbor fleets had arrived at and left Dragonstone, loaded with troops and dragonglass.  The supply lines Tyrion had redrawn directing food to White Harbor and Eastwatch were fully-functional and the proof was in the grain and salted meat that had just arrived at Winterfell along with Daenerys’s Dothraki horde.  The folk of Wintertown and Winterfell were about as terrified when the horde came riding in as they had been at the sight of the dragons, but no one ran, no one lashed out.  They had seen enough of the Dothraki in the last two weeks to trust their king’s judgment in allowing them here.

            Daenerys was with the Dothraki now taking reports, giving instruction, and presiding over the creation of the contingents who would be ‘mapping the North with their hooves.’  Jon, though, was sitting between Ghost and Viserion, watching the dragons blow smoke rings at each other.

            “They’re beautiful.”

            Jon looked over her shoulder to find Arya gazing with wonder at the dragons from a safe distance.  He couldn’t help smiling at his little sister who had idolized Visenya Targaryen as he stood and turned to her.  Ghost loped to her and jealously demanded pets, which she gave.  “Come meet them,” he said.

            Arya looked to him with wide eyes and grinned.  Slowly, she dropped her hands from Ghost’s head to her sides, then advanced towards Viserion.  All three dragons stopped blowing their smoke rings and peered at her with interest, sniffing the air around her.  Jon laid a hand on Viserion’s neck as the white dragon tilted his head at Arya.  _This is my sister…_ he whispered through their bond.  _This is Arya…Arya is family…Arya loves you and thinks you’re wonderful…please welcome Arya…._

            Viserion purred and the other dragons looked at him strangely, but he bid them no heed.  Instead, the white dragon tipped his head down at Arya, suddenly putting her several feet closer to his snout than she’d been a moment prior.  She stiffened, eyes like a doe staring down a hunter, but Viserion bowed his head to her and blew a smoke ring around her.  Arya giggled and offered a hand, which Viserion pressed his nose into.  “Gods,” she whispered.  “He’s wonderful.”

            _She adores you,_ he told Viserion, who purred in pleasure.  Jon had learned that Viserion craved validation and compliments, possessing far less confidence than his brothers.  The surest way to the dragon’s heart was through heartwarming words.  “He likes you,” he told Arya.

            Arya gazed into Viserion’s golden eyes in amazement and murmured to the dragon, “You’re amazing.  You’re the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”

            Viserion shut his eyes and purred again, leaning more heavily into Arya’s hand, demanding affection.  She giggled again and petted his snout with both hands.  Drogon and Rhaegal watched all this with tilted heads and narrowed eyes, thoroughly confused by the domestic behavior of their brother.  Jon grinned at them and could swear Drogon rolled his eyes at him.  He didn’t have the bond with them he did with Viserion, though, so he could only assume what they were thinking.

            Arya lowered her hands and Viserion opened his eyes to gaze at her, then blew another smoke ring at her and turned back to his brothers.  Drogon screeched at him needily and extended his wings, rising up off his cozy place in the scorched earth.  Rhaegal and Viserion followed suit and, a moment later, Drogon lurched into the sky, followed by his brothers.  The dragons’ wings sent cold Northern air buffeting back at Jon and Arya and they struggled to keep their footing as they watched the dragons take off.  The dragons wheeled together in the sky, then arced over the Wolfswood and disappeared from view.

            “Where are they going?” Arya asked, still smiling broadly.

            Ghost nudged Jon’s back with his snout and Jon turned to rub the jealous direwolf’s ears.  “Maybe to hunt.  They’re used to spending a lot of time in the air, though.  They’re quite active creatures.”

            “I can’t imagine locking them up in the Dragonpit,” Arya mused.

            Jon thought about that for a minute and found he agreed.  Daenerys had said that part of why Drogon was the largest and the most confident was because he had never been locked beneath the Great Pyramid in Meereen.  It made sense that creatures who craved freedom and independence the way dragons did would fare poorly in captivity.  “I can’t either.  Daenerys had to chain up Viserion and Rhaegal for a time in Meereen and she says they’re still not quite right about it.”

            Arya frowned.  “Why did she chain them up?  I thought she was the ‘Breaker of Chains?’”

            His brow creased in sadness at what little Dany had told him about Meereen.  Evidently, things had not been easy there and she’d had to make a lot of hard decisions, including locking up her beloved dragons.  “She wouldn’t tell me exactly why, only that they were becoming dangerous to her people.  They seem to do well here where they can hunt in the Wolfswood, but imagine them in a big city.  They’d be hungry, cramped, frustrated.  They killed livestock on the way here…I’m sure they did over there too.”

            Arya nodded.  “What made her release them?”

            Jon grinned.  This he did know the answer to.  “She couldn’t control them because she was afraid of them.  When she stopped being afraid of them and found herself, they started listening to her again.  I wish I could’ve been there to see her climb on Drogon for the first time.  I can’t even imagine.  Drogon took her away from Meereen because she wasn’t safe there.  That was when she found the Dothraki again and killed the khals so she could be khaleesi of them all.  When she got back to Meereen, she and Drogon freed Rhaegal and Viserion to help them burn the masters’ ships and defeat them once and for all.”

            “She’s an incredible woman, isn’t she?”

            He couldn’t help the proud grin that lit his face or the warm glow that expanded in his chest.  “Yes.  She is.”

            “And you love her.”

            Jon looked to Arya, who was smiling knowingly at him.  “Yes.”

            Arya laid a hand on Ghost’s shoulder and stroked his fur.  “Are you going to marry her?”

            It had been obvious before he knew he was a Targaryen, but to his surprise he now found himself only hesitating a second before answering, “Yes.  When the dead are defeated, we’ll be married here at Winterfell.”

            Arya grinned again.  “Good.”

            There was a terrible screech and then the dragons were flying overhead again, heading towards the Dothraki camp.  Jon frowned deeply and started after them, striding quickly through the snow.  “That didn’t sound good.”

            “What are they up to?” Arya asked, trailing after him.

            “I don’t know, but I think Daenerys is calling them.”  And if she was calling them rather than going to them, it couldn’t be good.  His heart began to race as he remembered being told that Daenerys had been shot, the way his organs dropped into his gut.  _Please let her be okay._

            When they got to the Dothraki camp, Jon shouldered his way through to where the dragons were gathered to find Daenerys standing on a rise and glaring daggers down at a Dothraki on his knees before her.  They were speaking in rapid Dothraki, the words guttural and strange coming out of Dany’s lovely mouth.  Finally, Dany cut off whatever the Dothraki had been saying, shouting, “This fool dared defy my orders.  Your khaleesi told you there would be no raping of the Northern women.  None.  If you can’t go a few months without your women and you can’t be bothered to take a Northern wife, you are too weak to remain here.  The punishment for this defiance is death!”  Then, she roared a long string of words in Dothraki he could only assume meant the same thing before turning on the lone Dothraki kneeling before her.  The dragons turned to face the man too, their eyes blazing.  Then, Daenerys said a word Jon knew well.  “ _Dracarys!_ ”

            Together, the dragons breathed fire down around their mother and upon the Dothraki, who was instantly incinerated.  When the flames died away, there was nothing left but a small pile of ash which blew away on the breeze.

            Drogon bent down to his mother and she mounted him.  Jon could almost feel the rage rolling off of her from here.  Drogon took to the air with a great leap over the Dothraki and Rhaegal followed.  Viserion hesitated and looked to him curiously, but Jon waved him off and the white dragon took off.  He had a feeling that Dany would want to be alone right then.

            “Wow,” Arya murmured.

            Jon sighed.  “She told me once that the Dothraki only follow strength.  If they ever begin to see her as less than the fiercest among them, they’ll turn on her.”

            “She rides a dragon; how could she not be the fiercest among them?”

            “She has to make sure they remember that.”  Jon started back towards Winterfell as the Dothraki began to talk amongst themselves and return to their business making camp.  Arya followed beside him, her hand on Needle at her hip.  She walked confidently, her back straight, her muscles battle-ready.  At some point while she’d been gone, she’d become a warrior.

            “When will you leave?” she asked him.

            “First light tomorrow.”

            “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

            Jon looked to his little sister, whose face was stoic but whose grey eyes betrayed her anxiety.  “I have to go.  I belong beyond the Wall, fighting the dead.  Bran says they’re approaching Eastwatch, so that’s where I’ll go.”

            Arya sighed deeply and canyons formed in her brow and around her eyes and mouth.  She looked years older, in fact she resembled Ned Stark with all of his brooding seriousness.  “I’d like to go with you.”

            Jon stopped stock-still.  An image came immediately to his mind of Arya surrounded by the dead, disappearing beneath their manic hunger and rage.  “No.”

            She sent him a deadly glare and turned to face him head-on, her shoulders square, her feet spread, ready to fight.  “‘No?’  You don’t even want to hear me out?  You don’t know me anymore.  I can help you.”

            “Arya, please,” he groaned.  “I can’t watch you die.  I can’t watch you rise again with dead, blue eyes.”

            “Maybe I won’t,” she said coldly.  In the blink of an eye, Needle was at his throat.  “If you beat me in a fight, I’ll stay here.”

            Jon raised both hands and tilted his head warily.  Was she out of her mind?  She must have heard stories about his swordplay.  “Arya.  I don’t want to hurt you.”

            Needle spun backwards over and under her hand, stopping in her hands behind her back.  The rage had cleared from her face and what remained was a cold calmness.  “You won’t.”

            He shook his head slowly, determined to decline again, but then Needle smacked the side of his neck and returned behind her back.  He jumped a bit in shock, but Arya just raised an eyebrow at him in challenge.  By now, some of the Dothraki and Unsullied around them had quieted and slowed to watch the staredown.  His stomach rolled, but he knew Arya.  If this was what it would take to keep her safe at Winterfell, fine.  He could hold back enough not to hurt her, just to wind her and knock her down.  “Fine.  But I’m not using Longclaw.  The Valyrian steel will cut Needle in two.”

            Arya’s face went sour, but she shrugged.  “Fine.”

            Jon sighed and unclasped his belt, removing Longclaw.  He turned, intending to lead the way back to Winterfell and the armory, but instead found an Unsullied standing there holding a longsword, flanked by half a dozen more of Daenerys’s men.  Apparently, they would have an audience.

            _Great._

            He groaned and handed over Longclaw in exchange for the longsword, then turned back to Arya.  She had Needle behind her back again and slowly spun it over and under her hands around her body.  He’d never seen anything like it and he wondered who she’d learned it from.  He tested the weight and balance of the longsword, then held it at the ready.  _Let her fight a little so as not to upset her, then trip her or something.  Just knock her over._

            Arya struck first, Needle glinting as it moved so quickly around his swing, batting his sword off thrice, then landing at the side of his neck again.  He frowned.  She was quick and Needle was so much lighter than the longsword it was no wonder.  He stepped into a quick swing, finding Needle and parrying a few times before Arya danced to the side.  He followed her with the longsword, but Needle danced around it, then batted it away again.  This time, though, he blocked her reach for his neck.

            A tiny smile appeared at the corner of Arya’s mouth.

            He let a little more of himself loose, striking, spinning, lashing out, and backstepping over and over.  He had always thought of himself as a quick sword fighter, light on his feet, but he wasn’t nearly as quick as little Arya.  Soon, he was battling to keep up with her and he realized that it was _her_ holding back.  She must have seen something change in his face when he realized it, because they both froze and she grinned at him.  Then, he let the wolf inside him loose.  They fought wildly, striking, parrying, dancing back and forth and around each other, panting and sweating.  A wide circle had formed around them of Dothraki, Unsullied, and Northmen too.  If he’d had time to think about anything but the current task, he might have been concerned about all the eyes.  As it was, he was beginning to struggle and though Arya looked like she was getting winded, she was still grinning.

            Finally, he knocked Needle away and lashed out with his foot to kick her off-balance.  He missed, though, as Arya jumped over his kick, and he felt something hard jab him in the ribs.  Shocked, he looked down to find the butt of Arya’s dagger pressed into him, the blade curving out under her arm.  “Got you,” she said, one dark eyebrow raised.

            Jon dropped his sword and she sheathed the dagger as the small crowd around them cheered.  Jon shut his eyes for a moment and groaned in defeat.  “Pack your things and be ready at dawn.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you love Jonerys, check out my other fanfic, "The House With the Red Door." :)


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